


born of the ice

by anirondack



Series: trans victor verse [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Depression, Dysphoria, Extremely Minor Character Death (Right At The Beginning), Gen, Hormones, Implied Sexual Content, Loneliness, M/M, No Malicious Transphobia, Non-Graphic Surgeries, Non-graphic injuries, Other, Pre-Canon, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Trans Victor Nikiforov, Transitioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-10 14:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 57,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10439478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anirondack/pseuds/anirondack
Summary: A character study on transmasculine Victor Nikiforov.(please check out both the beginning and end notes for fic notes and disclaimers!)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hey y'all, I've been working on this fic for over a month now. It's my baby and it's taken a lot of work and writing and rewriting to get here. I never ask this on any of my other work, but if you could leave some kudos and comments and maybe share it on your blog or with your friends, I would really appreciate it. It was a big labor of love and I want other people to love it too. 
> 
>  
> 
> Notes for before you read!  
> -There is NO MALICIOUS TRANSPHOBIA in this fic. This is safe to read.  
> -The minor character death is Victor's parents and occurs off screen. Be aware if this is something that might impact you pretty hard.  
> -The rink Team Russia trains at in the show is called "СПОРТИВНЫЙ КЛУБ ЧЕМПИОНОВ", literally "Sports Club Champions", which is a bad name narratively speaking, so for the purpose of this fic, it's been renamed to Yubileyny Sports Club, which is the real rink in Saint Petersburg where a lot of top Russian skaters train. Nevsky Ice Club is actually inside Yubileyny Sports Palace, but pretend it's not. The FFKK is the Russian figure skating federation, and the ISU is the International Skating Union.  
> -There is a timeline and note page attached as a pdf file in the end notes that you can look at if you want - it has the entire timeline of Victor's life and most of his events, as well as other characters who show up.  
> -Don't take any of the legal or legal medical specifics too seriously. It's very made up for the narrative, especially the hormones bit. Much of the transitional medical parts were written based on first and second hand experience, so be mindful.
> 
> EDIT: please stop commenting telling me the jumping is unrealistic. i know the jumping is unrealistic. this fic is a character study, not a figure skating manual.

When Victor is six, he sees the Olympics on television.

“Mama, look!” he says, reaching up at grabbing at his mother’s hand.

“What’s that, Vikochka?” she asks as he pulls over over to the television.

“Look at the skating!” Victor sits down on the floor again, leaning forward a little. On the screen, there’s a man dressed in a loose, flowy white shirt and tight black pants. Victor stares until he does a jump, then looks up excitedly. “Did you see?”

“Yes, I did, baby,” Victor’s mother says. “He’s one of the ice skaters from Russia.”

“How many skaters from Russia are there?”

“Lots and lots.” She sits down and pulls him back to sit between her legs and they watch the rest of the skate together. Victor claps his hands over his mouth when the skater nearly falls, but he corrects and continues and, eventually, he wins.

“That was so good,” Victor says breathlessly.

“He’s very good,” Victor’s mother agrees. “I heard he’s one of the best in the world.”

“I want to do that,” Victor declares.

Victor’s mother laughs. “I don’t think you’ll be able to do jumps like that for a little while, zolotko.”

“That’s okay, I can learn.”

She leans her chin on top of Victor’s head and pushes his hair behind his ear. “Do you really want to?”

“Yes, mama, I want to do what he did.”

Victor’s mother hums. “There are little skating rinks all over Saint Petersburg. We can go on adventure to one. Do you want to do that, Vikochka?”

Victor nods excitedly. He smiles all the way through the medal ceremony.

The next week, Victor’s mother dresses him in a warm jacket and tights under snow pants and they go to a little skating rink across the city from their house. She helps Victor tie the laces on his rental skates and walk over to the ice, and then she holds his hand as he steps out onto it. He falls nearly immediately, a few times, but once he gets the hang of it, it feels very natural. After a few laps, he even lets go of his mother’s hand and skates ahead. She holds onto the barrier and watches him as he goes.

“Look, mama!” Victor tries to turn around like the man on television had done and then falls down. His mother skates over and scoops him up but he’s already grabbing for the ice, wanting to get back down.

“Don’t skate backwards, you don’t know how,” she scolds him gently. “Just skate forwards.”

“I want to learn how to skate backwards!” he says.

“Maybe one day, you’ll learn.” She sets him down and helps him balance, and then he skates forward again, a little unsteady but completely unaided.

 

“Your daughter is a natural,” one of the rink instructors tells Victor’s mother.

“It’s her first time,” Victor’s mother says.

“That’s impressive. She’s already skating like my beginner classes.” The rink instructor leans against the barrier as Victor, across the rink, trips a little and steadies himself against the wall, then pushes off again. “You should think about lessons.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. She has natural talent. It would be a great opportunity to learn.”

Victor’s mother smiles a little. “I’ll speak with her father about it.”

Victor has to be practically dragged off the ice so the zamboni can smooth it all down, and he’s the first back on when the gates open again.

He skates around all day, and then he talks about it all night when they go home. Victor’s father leans his cheek against his hand and listens as Victor tells him all about Aleksei Urmanov and the gold medal and the little ice rink across town. Then he goes off and plays in his room and his mother sits down and brings up lessons. They talk about it quietly and don’t mention it when they put Victor to bed that night, but the next day, Victor’s mother hefts him up on her hip and says, “Do you want to learn to skate?”

Victor is enrolled in a beginners class at the ice rink across town. He moves through it quickly and gets in trouble for trying to do things that the class hasn’t learned yet. He falls down more than any other skater in beginners, but he’s also better than all of them. He just won’t stop doing bunny hop jumps and skating backwards into walls because he’s not very good at tracking yet.

He practices his crossovers as the instructor says quietly to his father when he comes to pick Victor up that Victor could be great. He’s made the half year beginner’s class worth of progress in just a few months, and he’s ready to move on. It’s worth looking into a real coach once he gets through intermediate and advanced lessons.

Victor moves up in classes alarmingly fast. He stays in intermediates just three months, and then in the advanced class for five. Victor’s father takes him out and buys him his own skates. They’re small and white and not very flashy, but Victor is just freshly seven and he’ll outgrow a new pair in half a year anyway.

From basic classes, he gets his own instruction time from the advanced coach, a former figure skater herself who had done okay in her career. She teaches Victor how to do his double jumps, how to do back crossovers without staring at the ice, how to spin on two feet and then on one foot. She teaches him old programs and he enters his first competition when he’s almost eight and wins. His parents sit in the stands and cheer him on and his father hoists him up onto his shoulders when they leave. Victor plays with his gold medal, just a little thing on a plain blue ribbon, but he’s so happy. His parents tell him all about what it’s like to see him skate. They’re so proud of him and his double flip and they’re proud of his double axel, even though he fell down. Victor hangs onto his father’s jacket shoulders and bounces a little, and he cleans his skates when he gets home because he doesn’t want to let go of the feeling that skating gives him just yet.

~

Victor is eleven, at a national training camp in Moscow with his coach, when his parents die.

Camp is much more rigorous than regular practice, so he doesn’t hear about it for a few hours. There are novice skaters from all over Russia, all converging on Moskvich to work for six or seven hours a day, running and spinning and jumping and lying on the benches in the warmup room doing sit-ups. Victor hasn’t been so tired in his life, but being around other skaters who are good enough and dedicated enough to be here feels good. He feels like he belongs.

And then one of the instructors calls him into the office and hands him the phone and he sits on a chair, skates still on, and listens wordlessly as a nurse from a hospital in Saint Petersburg tells him that that there was a car accident and now he doesn’t have parents anymore.

What does he do now? He’s numb as a camp instructor takes him back to the girls’ dorm room where everyone’s bunks are and sits with him on his bed. He doesn’t cry for a while, but when he does, he sobs so hard he nearly throws up. His coach shows up and kneels in front of him and hugs him tightly against her chest and she promises they’ll make sure he’s taken care of.

He wants to go home, but there’s no one to go home to. His house is big, and now it’s empty.

He’s excused from skating for the rest of the day while the camp instructors look through his registration paperwork and see if they can find a next of kin, but he doesn’t seem to have any. His parents were only children and wealthy but not the type for hiring help. Victor has no siblings, aunts, uncles, or grandparents. The person he’s closest to is his coach.

After two days, he comes back to the ice. Everyone skates on eggshells around him, but Victor wouldn’t notice a thing anyone said to him. He loses his mind in skating because skating has always felt good, and it lets him forget how miserable he feels for a moment as he kicks up into a triple axel and actually makes it. For the rest of camp, he’s the first person on the ice and the last person off. He works himself hard because it’s the only thing that feels good. He notices that he’s better than everyone else. Everyone else seems to notice too, but no one says anything about it. What could they possibly say?

After camp, all the Saint Petersburg students go back home. Victor is moved into the national team Junior commons, for skaters who can’t move with their whole families or get their own apartments. Legal things he doesn’t understand happen to him. He’s assigned a legal guardian by the state, but he doesn’t see him very often. The guardian seems to agree that the commons are the best place for Victor to be, surrounded by people who know and understand him, and Victor doesn’t want to leave them to live with someone he doesn’t know or understand. The man takes Victor back to the Nikiforov house, which is sickeningly empty. Victor collects his clothes and some of his toys and posters and books and a few of his parents’ things, rents a storage space to hold the stuff he can’t bear to give up and the stuff that seems important, and allows the guardian to do an estate sale on the rest. The house is sold and the money is added to Victor’s considerable new bank account. His guardian has control over that for a few more years, but he only uses it to pay for Victor’s spot in the commons, his food plan, his coaching fees, his maths and science tutors, his new skates. He’s a good person, and it’s not his fault Victor wants nothing to do with him.

His twelfth birthday is hard, and New Years even more so, but he gets through it. His coach takes him to her house for the first night of New Years and he drinks watered down wine with her and her husband and their two kids. He cries in the bathroom, but her family is nice and they take care of him and they let him sleep in the guest room for the whole week so he doesn’t have to go back to the commons alone.

As time goes on, the pain scabs over. Victor’s not very good at not picking at it, but it heals slowly despite his best efforts to hurt forever. He cries less and less, and he doesn’t feel as hollow as he used to. He can’t go to certain parts of Saint Petersburg anymore where memories are too strong, but the commons are on the other side of the city from his old house, so it’s not too hard.

He gets a new coach, who is experienced in leveling novices up to Juniors. He gets his own costumes now, instead of hand-me-downs and rentals. His legal guardian helps him pay for them and comes to some of his competitions. There starts to be prize money attached to them, and Victor just hands over the checks because he doesn’t really care about the money. He really just wants to skate. It’s the only time he feels happy, when he’s on the ice.

~

At fourteen, Victor gets some control of his finances, and he moves up to Juniors.

He could have done it last year, when he was thirteen, but he and his coach had talked about it and Victor had decided he wasn’t ready. He was technically brilliant, but being a _Junior_ is so much different than being a _novice_. Victor watches the girls’ Junior Grand Prix on television and cannot for the life of him imagine himself as one of them. How would he look in one of their competitions?

He feels more and more uncomfortable with it the closer he gets to his debut. In March, he has a quiet breakdown over whether he wants to advance at all. All he’s done is skate for half of his life, but is the girls’ Junior division really the right place for him? He feels _wrong_ about it, but when he talks to his coach, he can’t explain why. It’s just nerves, his coach assures him, an arm around his shoulders. He’ll be brilliant. He’s the best of all the novice girls in the world. He could medal in the girls’ Junior Grand Prix, even, if he just let himself try.

Victor nods and he smiles and he lets his coach register him with the FFKK and the ISU for the Junior Grand Prix, and then, alone in the commons, he panics about it. He wants to take it back, and then he berates himself for being cowardly. He knows he’ll do well in Juniors. He’s done tremendously well in novices. There’s nothing standing in his way of becoming the best female skater in all of Russia.

He gets a real choreographer who designs two jump-heavy programs for him. Victor has always been ahead of his classes in jumps - he can even land a quadruple toe loop sometimes. The choreographer thinks it’ll give him a leg up to be competitive with girls who have been in Juniors for a couple years already. He has two triple axels in each program, and some triple-triple combinations. They’re hard programs for Victor, but they’d be hard programs for anyone his age.

He gets two new costumes that are designed for his programs instead of just the music he’s skating to. They’re a lot more flowing and fancy than his novice costumes. The skirts are shorter and lighter, the leotards tighter because he needs a better range of movement. He feels like he’s aged several years in one costume fitting, because when he looks in the mirror, he looks more like a teenage girl than he’s ever felt like in his life. It’s incredibly jarring, but when he skates in them, they don’t hinder him, so he supposes they’re fine.

His first Junior event ever is in Belgrade. He sits on the bench, watching a girl three years older than him skate, and his coach rubs his shoulders and makes him take little sips of water. He’ll be fine. He’s the finest female skater she’s brought up in ages. Victor feels like he’s going to throw up, so his coach walks him through breathing until it’s his turn to go.

It’s a bigger stage than he’s ever been on. He’s never heard so many people cheer when he hears the loudspeaker announce _Victoriya Nikiforova, representing Nevsky Ice Club_ and he goes out on the ice and waves and a wall of sound waves back.

He does well. Nerves hurt him a bit, because he can’t shake the feeling of _I’m not supposed to be here_ and it irritates him. He can feel it affecting his performance - his technical scores are fine but his PCS suffers a little. He’s stiff when he knows he can be fluid. He keeps his arms close to his chest instead of outwards. There’s a type of artistry that, for some reason, feels like it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the performances.

His scores are good. He goes earlier in the lineup, so chances of sixes are small and he doesn’t get any, but he’s not surprised. He gets in the fives and that’s alright for now. His coach is happy and hugs him at the kiss and cry, but Victor is trying to avoid the gaze of a hefty television camera so he hides against her chest.

He places fourth in Belgrade, and it’s the first competition he’s been in in years that he hasn’t medaled. His coach rubs his back on the flight to Saint Petersburg and assures him that he’ll do better next time. It was his first time, and it’s normal to be nervous, and they’ll use this to grow and she's proud of him.

They go to Chemnitz a month later. Victor feels nerves again. He watches the others during warm ups and he wonders what he’s doing here. He knows it’s not fear of being a Junior, he’s way too good for novices now anyway, but he doesn’t know why he’s so stressed. He watches a small Japanese girl do a triple toe Salchow and feels very disconnected from everything happening on the ice.

His performance is good, though, good enough to net him a silver medal. The Japanese girl he watched during warmups skates last and she does a quadruple Salchow. She doesn’t quite finish it perfectly, but she stays upright on her landing and gets enough rotations, and the crowd screams for her. Signs with _Miki_ scrawled across them appear like magic. Victor picks at his nails, off to the side with the other skaters who have finished, and wishes that he could do that. She wins gold, and he’s not surprised. He knows he has catching up to do.

It’s not until the middle of November that his spot in the Junior Grand Prix final is confirmed. Victor’s coach picks him up and spins him around and congratulates him with a huge smile on her face. Victor smiles back, but it doesn’t sit quite right in his body. He trains harder for it, tries to do a quad Salchow and fails miserably, puts in more hours at Nevsky because he has to be ready.

He flies to the Netherlands for his first Junior Grand Prix final. The Japanese girl is there. She seems to recognize him because she gives him a sweet smile and she waves. Victor waves back hesitantly, and then is swept away to the locker rooms. He changes into his costume and he skates in the second group and he does well. It’s not as well as he would have liked, but he’s in third after the short program, on his component score this time. His jumps were good, but the Japanese girl does her quad Salchow and no one else can really compare to that.

Victor stays up late in the bathroom while his coach is asleep, staring at his free skate composition. He can’t replace anything with a quad, but he can change a triple-triple combination to a three jump combination with a triple axel. It’ll give him a higher base point value. The half loop in the middle that he needs to go into the next jump isn’t as nice - Victor thinks that half loops look kind of like tripping - but until he can manage a quad competitively, the triple axel will have to do.

He doesn’t tell his coach he’s changed anything until he’s on the ice doing it. He’s skating third to last and he fidgets nervously as he leans against his coach’s chest. She squeezes him and promises him that he’ll be alright. He breathes and believes her.

He does well. He moves up to first. Second place doesn’t catch him, and then first place surpasses him. She does another quad Salchow, cleanly this time, and Victor can’t catch up to that until he can do one too.

He gets a silver medal that’s heavier than any medal he’s ever gotten. It weighs down his shoulders and he feels like he has to struggle to stay upright and not curl in on himself as he stands on the podium, waving at cameras. He smiles at the people he’s supposed to smile at and he feels happy, he does. But it’s harder to win and to have won than it is in novices, and Victor can’t really tell why. He feels like maybe he shouldn’t have. Not that he isn’t good enough, because he knows he is. He knows he’s amazing. But he gives the medal to his coach because he doesn’t want to have it.

“Are you disappointed?” his coach asks when she sees the crack in his smile. “Silver is an amazing accomplishment, Vika. Especially in your first Juniors season. You’re going to be the best skater in the women’s division, you know that?”

Victor accepts her hug and feels the medal pressing into his chest. It feels hollow. He guesses that this is what losing feels like, wrong and unwilling to own it. He’s never felt so wrong losing before. He doesn’t understand.

At Junior Nationals, though, he takes gold. Hollow or not, he’s still going to be the best female skater in Russia.

~

In January, when Victor is resting because there are no Junior Europeans, a tall man in a fedora shows up to Nevsky and everyone gets very quiet.

Victor is practicing triple axels when he arrives, and he keeps on practicing triple axels as his coach skates off the ice and disappears. He gets some water and leans against the barrier wall to take a quick break, and doesn’t notice that almost everyone else at the rink is looking at him.

He’s still doing triple axels when his coach reappears. “Vika, come here,” she calls. “Come off the ice. Here, I have your guards.”

Victor skates off the ice, wipes off his blades, and snaps his guards on. The man in the fedora is standing by the exit of the warm up area. His eyes bore into Victor and Victor nearly takes a step back at the force of it.

“Come on, come on,” his coach says, pushing his shoes at him. Victor unlaces his skates and tugs them off and slips on his shoes, and then his coach tugs him upright and pulls him out of the rink area.

The tall fedora man is Yakov Feltsman. He is a coach at Yubileyny Sports Club, which has undergone a revolution as of late. He coaches the best of the best of all age ranges, including the current men’s singles world champion. He is notorious - even novices have heard of him - for being difficult and demanding and getting better results than any other figure skating coach in Russia.

He wants Victor to come to Yubileyny. He wants Victor to train under him. He calls Victor _Victoriya Dmitriyevna_ like he respects him.

Victor holds onto his coach’s hand and is talked into it pretty easily. He knows that if he wants to go far, he has to go far under Yakov. Yakov molds diamonds out of steel blades. If Victor can be molded, he knows he could be great.

He agrees. Yakov looks gruffly pleased. Victor’s coach looks pleased and sad. Victor calls his legal guardian, who he hasn’t actually seen in quite a while, and explains the situation. His guardian makes noises about coming to meet Yakov first, but in the end just shows up to help with the paperwork and make sure that Victor’s living situation is still okay.

The commons are close enough that Victor doesn’t need to leave them. Yubileyny is a good run or a bus ride away, so Victor can jog to practice in the mornings. His guardian helps him buy a bike, but Victor feels better when he runs, duffel bag strapped to his back, as the sun comes up.

Under Yakov, Victor becomes a force. In two months, Yakov sits him down, reworks his entire free skate program, ramps its difficulty up even more, and forces Victor higher and higher until he can match it. He’s only fifteen, but he surpasses all of Yakov’s other Junior girls with the right nudges and the right music cues.

Under Yakov, Victor shrinks inside his body. He hits a growth spurt in February that raises him up nearly an inch and he has to panickily readjust his jump takeoffs before Junior Worlds. Puberty catches him, even though he’s been skating away from it since he was eleven, and his chest becomes much more of an issue than he ever thought it would. It makes all his clothes sit wrong and he hates it. He wears hoodies more now, because he catches himself looking _off_ more and more often and it irritates him like an itch under his skin that he can’t claw out.

Victor takes gold at Junior Worlds with his reworked program. He stands on a podium in front of more people than he’s ever seen at a skating competition, even the Junior Grand Prix finals. They announce his name, _Victoriya Nikiforova, ladies’ Junior world champion_ , and cheers break his eardrums. Victor raises his bouquet in the air and waves and smiles and still doesn’t understand why he feels like he shouldn’t have won.

Yakov lets him have a single glass of champagne to celebrate. It’s Victor’s first time at a gala - he’d had to fly home right after the Junior Grand Prix to deal with some legal forms, and so had missed the banquet - and it’s overwhelming. He feels stiff like a board in a dress he doesn’t remember buying. Yakov helps him talk to tall men in suits who want to give Victor money and take pictures with him. Victor feels very affronted until Yakov pulls him aside and explains what athletic sponsorships are and tells Victor to stop driving them all away.

While Yakov is busy, Victor steals another glass of champagne from an unattended tray. He sneaks outside with the girl from Japan, who came in second with her quad Salchow, and they sit on the ground on a patio area and trade the glass back and forth, giggling a little. The girl’s name is Miki, like the posters said, and she’s the same age as Victor and every bit as talented as him. She’s as bubbly as the champagne and she makes Victor laugh and feel like maybe he belongs. She leans the sides of their heads together and gets glitter in Victor’s long hair and they look at stars, and then they convince third place, a very intense Italian girl named Carolina, to come outside with them. The three of them lean against the wall and look at the city lights and float on barely any alcohol in their small bodies until the Italian coach bursts through the door, Yakov in tow, and they all get yelled at. Victor just laughs, and Miki does too, and they go inside and are sent to bed with their medals in their pockets.

Victor rides the high of being Junior World Champion for a couple weeks. But then he starts slipping a little, catching himself feeling itchy and trapped when he has no reason to be. Yakov isn’t having any of it; he doesn’t let Victor take a second off just because this season’s events are over. Victor is at the rink every day at eight in the morning, except Tuesdays when there’s a scheduling conflict with the hockey team and Sundays when Yakov goes to church at Savior on Spilled Blood across the Bolshaya Neva and everyone has the day off to rest. Victor needs and hates those days, because his body aches from six days of six hours of training but he has nothing to do and no distractions. Thinking about his skating career makes his heart feel strange and bad and thinking about anything else is pointless. At least on all the other days he wears himself out and sleeps when he gets back to his room; on Sundays, all he can do is walk by the river and stare at himself in the reflection and wonder why his mind doesn’t fit his body anymore.

~

Getting up is hard today. Victor hunches his shoulders as he makes breakfast, even though there’s no one around to look at him. He hunches while he eats, and tugs his shirt out from his chest. The shirt is too tight to hang loose, though, and Victor is painfully aware of the way it curves down a little before it reaches his belly.

He gets dressed and hates it, standing in his workout pants and bare feet. His athletic shirt is fitted, which is generally more comfortable, but right now, he can’t stand it. He yanks it off and then regrets it, and looks at the ceiling as he paces around the room.

Eventually, he goes into his bathroom and digs out some bandages. They’re a little old - they were for an injury, once, when Victor was thirteen and sprained his ankle and had to keep it steady for a couple weeks. Since then, they’ve spent more time around his chest than around any joint. He forces himself to look in the mirror, because doing this without seeing is hard, and takes in a deep breath to keep his chest expanded, then pulls one end of the bandage across his chest. He flattens himself down with numb fingers, then wraps the bandage around and around himself until there’s none left. He gets some safety pins and attached the edge securely, then turns and looks at himself sideways in the mirror. There’s more of him than he would like, but it’s not so bad, and the bandage blends into his skin a little. He goes and gets his shirt and pulls it back on, and there are a couple of awkward seam lines, but it’s not too noticeable. It’s always better like this.

He takes the bus to the rink because he doesn’t want to run like this, and gets on the ice with the rest of the Juniors and does his warmups. Moving is not as easy like this. It’s the one drawback, but it’s worth it, Victor reminds himself at night when he rubs the backs of his ribs with insistent fingertips. Maybe he can slow all of this down. Maybe he can make it go away.

He tries to do a triple toe loop and he can’t get enough rotations, so it turns into a double. He frowns at himself and there are eyes on his back frowning at him as well. It doesn’t feel good, he’s drawing too much scrutiny. People are looking at him and it makes his skin feel like it’s crawling. Usually that’s fine – Victor is good showing off, he wouldn’t have passed novices if he wasn’t, but right now there are _eyes_ and they’re looking him up and down and touching all the parts he doesn’t want touched and discomfort claws at his insides.

He has to get the triple toe loop. That’s all there is to it. He did all his double jumps okay, accepting quiet praises and criticisms together from some older girls, and corrected himself accordingly. But he can’t even get the easiest of triples, and that’s unusual. He nails triple toe loops all the time. People will wonder, and come over to ask, and Victor has no words to explain that today, he has to sacrifice skating to keep from ripping his skin off.

He tries the triple toe loop again. He doesn’t finish the third rotation and lands poorly. He doesn’t fall, but he touches down, and his body sways oddly when he straightens up again. Are his hips too wide? They’re pretty slim, but now they’re out of balance with his chest and his center of gravity could be different. Could it? No, that’s not how it works. Maybe air resistance?

Victor ponders and thinks and worries and lines up for another triple toe loop. His toe pick scrapes the ice instead of catching it properly and he lifts up and spins and trips and lands hard on his arm. Pain flares up his side like a howling wind and then dulls, aching badly in his chest and in his throat. There’s quiet for a moment, where Victor tries to remember how to breathe when there’s pain choking him, and then when he doesn’t get up, someone calls out something and three sets of blades come racing toward him. _No_ , Victor wants to wheeze. _Don’t come look_. But they do, two other girls in his Juniors class and a Senior in the women’s division, they all skate up to him and kneel down, hands hovering over him like they’re afraid to touch.

“Vika?”

“Are you okay?”

“What happened?”

“I heard you fall, where did you land?”

“Did you hit your head, Vika?”

“Where’s Yakov?”

“Coach Yakov!”

Victor closes his eyes and doesn’t answer any of the questions. Breathing feels a lot harder than it did a minute ago.

There’s a voice calling back to them now, and one Junior girl looks up and replies while the others stay at Victor’s side.

“Vika, can you get up?” the oldest girl asks.

Victor doesn’t know, but he nods anyway. Hands wrap around his arms and help ease him onto his knees. Pain flares up his throat and sits on his tongue, so he bites it and struggles to his feet, hunching over but upright. His breath is coming in short, soft pants as they half-guide, half push him to the gate. Yakov is there waiting and he doesn’t even let Victor put his guards on before marching him off to the med center.

Victor lies back on one of the beds they have in the med center, his skates removed and on the floor, and stares at the ceiling. Panic is squeezing his chest almost as tight as the bandages. Yakov is speaking to one of the club medics, gesturing at Victor and explaining what happened. Victor realizes he doesn’t know if Yakov actually saw or not and a fresh wave of panic threatens to drown him.

The medic comes over and pulls on a pair of latex gloves, then touches Victor’s hand. “Victoriya, tell me what happened.”

“My entry for my toe loop was bad,” Victor says. He feels ashamed of it. He would not be under this type of scrutiny, so far from the rink, if he had just done it right like usual. “And I fell and landed on my side.”

“Oh, that must have hurt,” the medic says sympathetically. She squeezes Victor’s wrist, then takes a half a step back. “I’d like to check you out, to make sure there’s no significant damage.”

“I– uh–”

“Yakov can leave,” she says in a lower voice. “If you’re not comfortable with him being here.”

Yakov has most certainly seen almost every part of Victor’s body by now, shouting and lecturing him about double axels while Victor is changing and ignoring him, but Yakov hasn’t seen the pale brown bandage around Victor’s chest, and shame makes Victor nod.

“Okay,” the medic says soothingly. “Yakov. You can wait outside.”

Yakov grumbles a little, but goes out without any comment or complaint. He nudges the door shut behind him.

“Is that better?” the medic asks kindly.

“Coach Yakov will be mad,” Victor whispers.

“What? Of course he won’t. Every skater has the right to their own privacy.”

“No, why I fell.”

The medic looks confused. “You’re still training, Victoriya, no one is mad. You’re not even a Senior yet.”

“No, I…” Victor falls silent, expression miserable. He reaches down and tugs his training shirt up, revealing the bottom of the bandages.

“Oh,” the medic says. “May I?”

Victor nods, so the medic very carefully works his shirt up and over his head. She sets it to the side and her gloved fingers touch the edge of the bandage.

“Are you injured?”

“No. Well… Not before.”

“Then what’s this for?”

“I just… I needed it.”

“For what?”

The medic sounds so honestly confused and curious that Victor wants to curl in on himself, away from her gaze, and never be looked at again. How does he explain the feeling of crippling wrongness that settles over him sometimes? Sometimes it’s manageable and he puts on his sports bra and a training shirt and runs to the rink, and then there are days like this, where the idea of being _seen_ by anyone makes him want to scream.

“To be… smoother,” Victor tries.

“To be…?” There’s quiet for a moment, and then the medic says, “Oh.”

Victor closes his eyes.

“You’re trying to hide your chest with this bandage.”

Victor’s jaw clenches.

“Have you been– do you do this often? I didn’t see in your file from your last physical…” The medic sounds worried again. “Have you spoken to any doctors about binding like this?”

“No,” Victor whispers. “It’s a secret. I shouldn’t be doing it.”

The medic’s mouth opens, and then she closes it again. “Oh, dear,” she murmurs. Her hand shifts from Victor’s chest to his arm. “We’ve been all wrong about you, haven’t we?”

“Not all wrong,” Victor says.

The medic nods. “I think I understand.” She turns away for a moment, then comes back with a pair of shears and Victor’s shirt. “I need to cut this off before it hurts you anymore,” she tells him. “But here’s your shirt, and once I cut the bandage off, I’ll turn away and you can cover yourself up, okay?”

Victor nods gratefully.

“Okay. Lift your arm over your head?”

Victor complies, forearm slung over his hair. The medic lifts the edge of the bandage up and slides one half of the shears under it, then starts gently cutting. More and more of Victor’s ribs are able to expand, which is okay, right up until the point that it’s very very _not_ okay. Victor feels like the air is punched out of him and he gasps as the medic murmurs, “Oh, that’s not very good.”

She finishes cutting the bandage, then turns away as promised, but it takes Victor a little while to get ahold of himself. Pain is flaring angrily and violently in his chest, squeezing his right lung. It’s so much worse than it had been just a moment ago and it’s so hard to bring himself back. He forces himself to take slow, measured breaths, and visualizes the pain getting smaller and smaller until it works. He carefully arranges the shirt over his chest so that it’s all covered and uniform looking, and then murmurs, “Okay.”

The medic turns back around and leans in, examining Victor’s side. “This is going to hurt a little bit,” she warns him. “I need you to tell me when the pain gets worse.” Her fingers trace up his ribs slowly, examining the length of each one, and again, it’s okay until it’s very not okay.

“ _Ah_ ,” Victor gasps and tries to squirm away.

“Okay, there it is. I’m going to keep going.” She moves onto the next rib, and that one is fine, and the next one, all the way up to Victor’s armpit. “Just that one time that it hurt?”

Victor nods.

“Okay. We’ll do an x-ray to be sure, but it appears to be a small fracture. There’s some bruising, but not much yet. Do you want to look?”

Victor shakes his head.

“Okay. Well, the bruising is spreading a little, but your ribs all seem to be in the correct places, so I think it’s just a hairline fracture. I can’t say for sure if you would have cracked it anyway if you’d fallen, but the bandages likely helped cause the damage.” The medic strips off her gloves and tosses them in a nearby bin, then goes to a cabinet and rifles through a box until she finds a folder labeled _Nikiforova, Victoriya Dmitriyevna_. She opens it and reads through a couple of notes, then comes back to Victor’s side. “You don’t have any known allergies, correct?”

One nod.

“Unfortunately, there’s not much to be done for broken ribs other than rest, ice, and pain medication. I’ll get you some ice in a moment, and then we have some anti-inflammatory pain medication that I can give you. But first, we need to have a quick talk.”

A second nod.

The medic hesitates for a moment, then presses on. “This form of chest binding that you’re doing, with the bandages, is unsafe. It’s very dangerous and it can lead to things like this, broken ribs, and bone deformities if you do it often.”

“I don’t…”

“But you may in the future.” The medic pulls over a stool and sits down. “I don’t think this is an isolated incident, is it?”

Victor stares at the insides of his eyelids for a while, then shakes his head.

“Victoriy– I mean… God, okay. Is there no one you’ve spoken to about this?”

A head shake.

“Are you even comfortable being addressed as Victoriya?”

“It’s my name,” Victor says, distantly.

“It doesn’t have to be. What do you want, right now?”

That throws Victor and grinds his thoughts to a halt. What _does_ he want right now? It’s not a question he asks very much. There’s always what he has to do. More skating, more running, more crunches. More hours at the rink, more time sleeping at the commons. What does he want to be called? Suddenly, he can’t remember how he refers to himself in his own head. Is it by Victoriya? Or Vika? Or anything?

“I don’t know,” Victor says eventually.

The medic presses her lips together, but she nods. “Okay. Well… Let’s make up something for just right now.” She touches his wrist again. “Yakov calls you Vika often. Do you like that? Or– or Victor, that’s very close, or your patronymic? Dmitriyevna is still…” she trails off a little, mumbling to herself, sounding a little flustered, and then shakes her head. “What do you think?”

Victor can’t think. Everything is very overwhelming. He wants the pain medication. He wants to go back to this morning and call Yakov and tell him he’s not coming to practice. He wants to rip the last characters of his name off of his birth certificate. He wants to set his patronymic on fire.

He wants to stop being so quietly in so much pain.

“Victor is okay,” he says eventually.

“Victor,” the medic echoes, clearly relieved to have something concrete to use. “And, um, she? Or he? Or…”

Victor is quiet again. What does his own brain say? What’s the difference between being a girl and being a boy? What’s the difference between being a boy in his head and being a boy out loud? He can look in the mirror and think _girl_ as many times as he wants, but his mind doesn’t really accept it anymore and he didn’t really notice. Or he can look in the mirror and think _boy_ as many times as he wants, but his lips don’t have the practice forming the word. Does _he_ even mean anything? _She_ doesn’t. It’s a word thrown in Victor’s direction so much that he never noticed it bothered him. It’s a pinprick that happens so often that the spot of irritation stops registering it. What would _he_ be like?

“I don’t… know?” God, he wishes she would just make the decision for him.

“Well… Okay, well. If you had to pick one. Girl or boy. Or… neither, if you don’t like those.”

“Boy?” he says hesitantly. It feels so strange to say something like that. He would never have said it himself. But it feels like two rusty cogs are being shoved together correctly for the first time in a while, becoming jerkily functional again.

“Okay. Victor the boy. Good.” She says it with such conviction, like Victor the boy _is_ good. Victor the boy is an okay thing to be. She likes Victor the boy, enough that she’s not staring at his injury because it’s too close to his chest, but instead his face, which isn’t even looking at her.

Victor wants to like Victor the boy too.

“So, Victor… This is the kind of thing that your coach needs to know about,” the medic says apologetically. “At the very least, one of us will have to tell him cracked your rib because you were binding with compression bandages. There’s no real way around that one.”

Victor, through bile, nods.

“Okay. I’ll let you decide who you want to tell him. And the other thing is… Okay, I don’t want to put any words on you. But if you feel like a boy, enough that your body hurts you, that may not go away if you keep pretending to be something that you aren’t.”

“That’s what skating is,” Victor says softly.

“That’s what _performing_ is,” the medic corrects. She sounds sad. “In competitions, you perform. In practice, you learn. In practice, you grow. You’re extremely talented, Victor–” Her mouth moves like it wants to form the last vowels of Victor’s name but she manages to cut them off. “Everyone knows that. You’re taking the Juniors by storm. But are you happy about it?”

Victor just stares at her. His gold medal sits in his chest like it’s actually there, quietly suffocating him.

“Do you like competing as a girl, in the girl’s Junior division?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“This season, you’ll be eligible for Seniors,” the medic says. “And that’s something you should know, and that’s something you’ll have to talk to Yakov about too.”

“I don’t…”

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t. Yakov is not a hateful man - no one at the rink is - but Victor has held onto this secret confusion like it could wreck him if it slipped out of his control. And here it is, in open air, breathing down Victor’s neck. He is fifteen and he does not want to make this decision right now.

“I can’t. I can’t, I–” There’s the shame again, directly on schedule, and panic. What if he can’t skate? He can lie, lying is easy, he’s been lying through his blades since he was eight years old. He imagines press leaks and ISU letters and Yakov’s cool gaze and he shakes his head. His eyes burn and tears threaten him so he reaches inside himself and holds them back. “I can’t.”

“Hey, hey. Shh. It’s okay. You’re in a lot of pain right now. I’m going to get you ice.” The medic slips away from Victor’s side and Victor feels at once relieved and suffocated. There are distant sounds that he can’t process. Everything is too much. The pain is receding in his chest, but there’s pressure mounting in the base of his skull and radiating downwards. He breathes and winces and breathes again. The pressure recedes a little. He breathes.

“Victor.” His eyes flicker open and the medic is back, with an ice pack wrapped in a paper towel and a tiny plastic cup with two pills in it. “These will help. Here.” She hands him the pills and then a glass of water, and he swallows them down with no hesitation. Then she gives him the ice pack and helps him place it on his side. It stabs through him when he touches the injured rib, but the pain settles faster than before.

“Thanks,” he says softly.

“Of course. Now… Yakov is still outside. I want to update him on your condition. I need you to tell me how much to disclose.”

Victor swallows around the feeling of pills still in his throat. One fingernail scratches gently at the paper towel. The world grinds to a halt and then starts moving again. Victor feels very aware of his body.

“All of it,” he says eventually.

“Everything?”

Fuck it. “Yes.”

“Okay,” the medic agrees, a little hesitantly. “I’m sure he’ll want to speak with you after, so you should put your shirt back on. Do you need help?”

“I can do it.”

“Okay. I’ll knock.” The medic stands up again and quietly makes her way out of the med center. Victor hears Yakov’s gruff voice just before the door closes again, and then the hint of muffled conversation after that. He can’t make anything out, so he gives up and carefully threads his arm through his shirt. He tugs it over his head, then pokes the other arm through, and drags it down one handed before he puts the ice pack back. He wonders loudly to himself if he remembered to refill the ice trays in his freezer back in his tiny apartment. He’ll have to ice this a lot for the next few days. Maybe he can get a few of those reusable ones. It would probably save on plastic bags.

There’s a sharp knock at the door and it startles Victor. He jumps a little, then coughs and hisses. “Yes.”

The door opens and Yakov comes in. His face is somewhat redder, but he doesn’t look angry. He comes in and sits in the stool the medic had left; she hadn’t come in with Yakov.

“So,” Yakov says.

Victor looks at him blankly.

“Six weeks off,” Yakov informs him. “You’re very lucky we’re in the off season now.”

Victor inclines his head in a nod. His heart is racing.

“You can’t be training for most of that. I want you to do weight training when you can, but nothing that makes you breathe hard. No running, no skating. You have to come back to be checked out every week, at minimum, and you’ll be expected to keep thinking about the composition of your next–”

“Just say it,” Victor snaps.

Yakov looks surprised. Victor is surprised too– he rarely snaps at anyone, let alone Yakov.

“Just get it over with,” he continues, quieter. “I know she told you– about me. I know you know. So just say what you’re going to say.”

Yakov’s face is doing something strange. On other people, Victor might call it sensitivity. Yakov has plenty of compassion, but sensitivity is not really in his wheelhouse. Maybe it’s a new shade of anger that Victor hasn’t seen before. He suddenly and deeply regrets snapping.

But Yakov says, “I wish you had told me before you injured yourself.”

“What would that have accomplished?”

“Perhaps you not hurting yourself in misery,” Yakov says. “Perhaps a club medic not informing me that I don’t actually know my student.”

“You do know me,” Victor argues. “Just... not that part.”

“It’s an important part,” Yakov says. “For skating and for life. It’s an important part and you’ve kept it hidden for so long, haven’t you?”

Victor is silent, because he can’t argue with that.

“I wish you hadn’t,” Yakov adds. “But I don’t begrudge you for doing so.”

Victor lets out a slow breath. Then he inhales and lets out another slow breath. Then he does it again. He imagines the pain small.

“But. It has become important now. So a few things,” Yakov says briskly. “To start, you are not allowed to bind during practice again. No matter what. If it’s not an injury, you can’t wrap it.”

Victor nods again. He guesses it’s fair. It hurts to agree to, but his ribs hurt too.

“And if you… need to do that, there are better ways of doing it,” Yakov continues awkwardly. “So you should look into that.”

“Okay.”

“But not on the ice. Or when running. No binding during training.”

“I understand.”

“Or when sleeping.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Yakov looks a little bit less blustery now, but he also looks a little adrift himself, like he doesn’t know how to say what he has to say, or if he wants to say it at all. “There’s… no precedence in figure skating for something like this.”

“I know.”

“We’re in uncharted territory now. I know how track and the triathlons have handled it in the past, but I doubt that the ISU has rules about it.”

Victor is silent again. His eyes are trained on Yakov’s face.

“We’ll have to make it up as we go along, but don’t be… surprised,” Yakov says. He shrugs a little. “Whatever happens. We’ll sort it out when it comes up. You just have to keep working on your programs.”

“So you won’t… transfer me?”

Yakov’s face very briefly looks very sad. Then it passes, but for a second, he looks incredibly old. “Of course not, stupid child. You’re one of my best skaters. I’m not going to stop coaching you because you feel like a boy.”

Again, all the air is punched out of Victor’s chest. Yakov still doesn’t look angry (this might be the longest Yakov has ever gone without yelling) and it makes Victor feel strangely off kilter. He definitely doesn’t want Yakov to yell at him, but it’s strange.

“It’s still secret,” he blurts out. “Just between us, okay?”

“Are you sure about that?” Yakov asks.

“For now, yes. I need…” That’s even harder than  _what do you want?_ Victor needs so many things. To get that quad Salchow down. To shower. More food in his system. Ribs that aren’t broken. His parents. So many things and Victor needs them all desperately. “I need to think.”

“Do it with your head this time and not with your skates,” Yakov says.

Victor almost laughs. The pain deters him, but he does give Yakov a weak smile.

Yakov doesn’t return it. He looks thoughtful. “So… Victor?”

“I don’t hate Victoriya,” Victor says. “I’m not going to make you stop using it.”

“Your doctor was very insistent,” Yakov says. “So. Victor.”

“Victor,” Victor agrees.

“But it’s a secret.”

“Yes.”

“That will be hard for you, to have both at once.”

Everything is hard. “I can handle it.”

“I know.”

Victor believes him.

They look at each other for a moment, and then Yakov gets blustery again. “I’m serious, though, no more binding for training. If I see you binding while wearing ice skates again, I will withdraw you from the Junior Grand Prix.”

The threat, for some reason, feels good. There’s nothing particularly good about it, but it feels like permanence. Yakov will stick around to yell at Victor, just like he has for the last half a year.

“I’m going to find someone to drive you home,” Yakov says briskly. “Stay here.”

He gets up without another word and heads out of the room. The medic comes back in, looking mildly concerned, but Victor just gives her a thumbs up. She smiles at him, then makes him stand up and go to another room so she can x-ray his chest. The fracture isn’t bad, just a hairline crack in the bone, and only on one rib. She reminds him to ice and take pain medication and take care of himself, and then one of the Senior skaters comes in, keys in hand, to take Victor away. She helps Victor walk out of the med center to grab his gear, and then she carries it for him as they walk to the car. She gets him settled in, then gets in the driver’s seat and starts the car. Victor leans back and closes his eyes, letting the pain medication lap the nails dragging at his insides away.

“How are you feeling, Vika?” she asks as she takes a right turn out of the parking lot.

Victor’s eyelids bob a little. “I’m okay,” he says truthfully. “I feel pretty… pretty okay.”

~

It does not feel pretty okay for long.

Victor is off the ice for exactly six weeks and five days. He feels fine after four weeks, but Yakov refuses to budge until the club medics come back with clean bills of health. The six weeks and five days are actually pretty relaxing. It’s kind of annoying to not exercise much, and Victor has to be more careful of what he eats. He does leg lifts and stretches and weight lifting and, after a while, pushups and crunches, but he doesn’t go jogging until week five and his stamina is shot to pieces. But other than that, it’s nice. He goes out and sees movies and walks around Saint Petersburg in the evenings with paper coffee shop cups of hot chocolate, people watching. He sleeps in late (which, for Victor, is about eight thirty or nine in the morning) and goes to bed late (which, for Victor, is around midnight) and learns some French. He tries on _boy_ in the mirror like a new shirt and he likes the way it fits. He speaks to almost no one, besides when he has to go to the rink for checkups. It’s lonely, but it’s also kind of refreshing. There are few pretenses to being alone.

When he gets back, he’s put with the novices until he can get his stamina back up. It’s a little humiliating – he’s fifteen and can’t even _be_ a novice anymore – but it’s also a bit of an ego stroke because all the novices look up to him and clamour around him, asking him to show them how to do a perfect double axel.

But the novelty wears off and it’s suddenly very hard not to notice how people react around Victor. He’s hyper aware of when people are speaking to him, or about him. He knows the moment someone pauses what they’re doing to watch him practicing spins.

It’s a terrible clash of dissonance. Victor meets with the same club medic, the one who had taken care of him when he first fell, every time he gets checked up, and every time, she closes the door and calls him Victor. Then he leaves and all of the _Vika_ s and _Victoriya_ s she didn’t say come raining down on him. He changes in the showers next to the locker rooms instead of the locker rooms themselves because the showers have at least some privacy. He starts to avoid talking to the other Junior girls. He works harder, longer, because it’s only when people start leaving that he feels like he makes any progress.

Yakov notices, but says little about it. He calls Victor _Vika_ too, still, but there’s a tense sort of strain in his face when he does it, like he knows it’s wrong but he can’t really do anything about it. Victor kind of regrets telling Yakov to keep things secret, but the other option is telling Yakov not to keep things secret, which is more than Victor can really handle right now.

It gets bad when competition starts. Before, it was just Yubileyny, but now, it’s Sofia and Mexico City and Zagreb. Now, it’s the hotels before and the medal ceremonies after. It’s hearing his name announced with his score to hundreds of people and smiling as they take pictures of someone named Victoriya Nikiforova. It’s the floaty half skirt of his free skate costume that spins out when he moves, showing off red under the black. It’s the low cut of his short program’s leotard that shows off too much of him. It’s interviewers shoving tape recorders in his face and asking questions and skipping straight over _Victoriya_ to _Vika_ even though it’s rude. It’s smiling and answering those questions anyway - putting on a smooth, sparkly mask that betrays nothing but blithe contentment and gentle pride over a win and thanking the others who couldn’t catch up to him. It’s keeping a secret that shouldn’t be a secret, but not being ready to tell anyone.

It’s still lonely, in a different way. Now, Victor is surrounded by people all the time. The ice is in use for fourteen hours a day. Designers and choreographers come and go. Medics strap on dull, flat, rentable ice skates to help rehabilitate injured skaters as fast as possible before their events. Victor spends cumulative days in airports and on airplanes, stuffed next to Yakov and some other Juniors as they fly to Mexico and Yakov snores as they’re flying over the Atlantic ocean and the flight attendant asks, _would you like another drink, miss?_ He smiles at her and politely shakes his head, and no one speaks to him until they’re somewhere over New England and the same question is asked, about dinner this time. No one speaks to Victor about anything that isn’t skating.

He wins gold at all of his Junior Grand Prix series events, and the Final as well. He turns sixteen in a hotel room the night before Nationals, and then he crushes Nationals. He wins Worlds in Sofia, breaking a record that he watched be set two years ago by a girl who is now a Senior in Japan. The medals keep piling up, and still, no one says a thing about anything that isn’t skating. There is no _what will you do during the off season_ _?_  and no _what will you do with your prize money?_ and no anything at all that would suggest that Victor ever does anything except step sequences. There’s only _have you started choreographing your next short program yet?_ and _what do you think of the new scoring system?_ and _when are you moving up to Seniors?_ and a long, thorough dissection of every move he made in the three minutes and thirty-seven seconds of his free skate.

Victor stops remembering the interviews. He knows he was there, but they’re not talking to him. They’re talking to a cardboard cutout of a sixteen year old girl and they don’t even know it. Sometimes he feels bad for them, and sometimes he hates them so much that he can’t stand it. It’s not their fault that their job is unbearable to him, but it doesn’t keep him from checking out and coming back to himself later in his hotel room as he showers gel out of his hair.

That summer, he trains hard. People take weeks or even a month off during May and June, but Victor has nowhere to go and no one to talk to anyway, so he trains. There aren’t many people there, so it’s easier. Victor feels less scrutinized, and his body flows better. He nails his jumps. He learns how to do a quadruple Salchow from watching video recordings in his room. His triple axel is cleaner. His triple flip is less wobbly. His step sequences spread all over the ice, leaving tiny divots, but they feel good to do.

Sometimes, there’s no one else on the ice and he gets the whole rink to himself. Yakov watches him, leaning against the barrier, silent. Victor skates a lap, practices a jump, skates a lap, practices a jump. It can go on for an hour. Yakov holds a bottle of water out to Victor as he passes and Victor returns it to him when the lap is done, and then he goes and practices his triple Lutz and doesn’t fall.

And then it’s July and everyone comes back, ready to start work on their new programs. Victor is swamped by people with tans and people with bad sunburns and people with kitschy ornaments they picked up on their vacations that they try to show off to him, like he’d be impressed by them. The mask slips back on and Victor asks them questions that earn long winded answers, but the more they talk, the less he has to, and the easier it is to look like who they think they’re talking to.

Victor’s short program costume is mercifully high-necked, with merciful long sleeves, and mercifully few colors. The skirt is just a little bit shorter than last year’s, a little bit lighter so that it floats better. His tights are black instead of the odd brownish-peach they call ‘skin color’, and they cover up his skates so that the white doesn’t clash. It makes him look… adult, in a pretend way. Like he’s pretending to be a grown up woman, and everyone is willing to play along.

The free skate costume is more fun, bright reds and blues in a gradient. Yakov says it looks very patriotic. Victor says it looks patriotic for the wrong country and that it makes him look American, and Yakov tugs his earlobe. The skirt is longer in back, like a floaty train, or the back of a long coat, and Victor kind of likes it, even as he hates it. It matches his program, anyway - it looks very operatic. It looks like a show.

And it’s unbearable again.

Yakov corners Victor one night after practice, standing in front of the gate as Victor wipes his skates off. There are two people besides them left, and they’re at the other end of the ice, practicing their camel spins. “Vitya.”

“Yes, Coach Yakov,” Victor says, a little mechanically. He’s still in his protective shell, though he pushes out of it the more people leave.

“Your senior debut,” Yakov says.

Victor’s jaw clenches.

“You didn’t want to do it last season,” Yakov adds.

“I had more to achieve in the Juniors.”

“And you’ve achieved it. Are you going to stay there still, now that you’ve achieved everything?”

“No,” Victor mutters sullenly.

“The Junior Grand Prix series starts in September, and the regular one starts in October. You’re going to be in one of them, so I need to know which one.”

Victor chews on the inside of his cheek. Technically, he’s ready to move up to Seniors. He knows he is. He was probably ready last year, and had been told as much by a hundred people as they held microphones under his nose.

But Seniors is… permanent. Seniors is _it_. And Victor is scared of that.

“I think… I think one last Junior Grand Prix,” Victor says.

“Vitya. Are you sure?”

“I’ll have to think about it for more than the fifteen seconds I’ve spent just now, but probably.”

Yakov clicks his tongue.

“But maybe…” Victor leans against the barrier too, a foot or so from Yakov. He looks at the rubber matting on the floor. He looks up at the walls. He doesn’t look at his coach. “Maybe Nationals. Maybe I could debut there.”

“In the middle of the season?”

“It’s been done before. It’s not uncommon. And then they could consider me for Europeans, if I do well.”

“You’ll do fine.”

“I know.” The wall stares back at Victor. There are some hockey jerseys immortalized in glass frames, some medals that their owners donated to the Club. Lists of names engraved on trophies. Victor has plenty of medals, even engraved ones. He never looks at them anymore.

“You’re thinking so loudly,” Yakov tells him. “Is it anything useful?”

“Just… How. To debut.”

“You will likely go out and do your short program and beat everyone, and then do your free and beat everyone again and win a medal. That’s what you usually do.”

“But… who’s going to be everyone?”

Yakov starts to speak and then stops. Victor looks at the floor again. He can’t look at the trophies anymore. Those names are permanent, part of Yubileyny history. No one can get back in the case and etch them out and try again.

“Well, that depends,” Yakov says eventually, “on what you think you’re prepared to do.”

“Anything,” Victor says, with more feeling than anything he’s spoken in a week.

“Anything? That’s a lot of things, Vitya. A big promise.”

“I know.” Victor picks at a seam in his gloves. He tries to remember debuting for Juniors. It hadn’t been bad – he’d done very well and won a silver medal like a last hurrah for his old coach. But he hadn’t had words before, he hadn’t had _Victor the boy_ hovering in the background at all times. It’s been a year, now, and Victor hates _Victor the boy_ with a passion that he reserves for almost nothing else. Some of it is resentment, that _Victor the boy_ gets called by the right name and Victor himself doesn’t, that _Victor the boy_ isn’t jumping bra sizes as puberty pummels him while Victor’s whole body has felt off kilter and wrong for years, that _Victor the boy_ never has to talk to someone who doesn’t understand him. The rest is jealousy. Victor know that it’s absurd to be jealous of himself, but he can’t help it. _V_ _ictor the boy_ is who Victor wants to but cannot be anywhere except alone.

“Vitya.”

 _Victor the boy_ smiles to himself, in a world where his name rolls easily off the tongues of everyone at the Club. Victor seethes over the fact that Yakov could not and would not address him if those other girls were any closer.

“I’m not ready yet,” he says abruptly. “I want to compete in the Junior Grand Prix again as my last Juniors event. I’ll… I’ll do something after that. I’ll make the decision.”

Yakov nods. He looks resigned – Victor can tell that he wanted, if not a better answer, then at least a concrete one. “You can’t wait until after the entire series, but you have a little bit of time. Make sure to think it over.”

“I will.”

“And come talk to me about it when you make a decision.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Good.” Yakov taps the rink barrier with both hands, then draws away, walking to the other skaters to correct some form. Victor watches him, then drops his head onto his arms and groans. Budapest is so soon, only a couple months away. That’s not enough time. Will there ever be enough time?

He looks for _Victoriya the girl_ , to ask for her input, but she’s never been real anyway and there’s nothing but silence.

~

“Vika!” Yakov bellows. “Office!”

Victor looks up from practicing his step sequence and shoves hair out of his face. Yakov is standing at the edge of the rink, arms crossed, looking angry, but Yakov always crosses his arms and looks angry around competition time so it’s hard to tell what he wants. Victor skates over to the gate and wipes the ice off his blades, then steps out to the bench where all the blade guards are piled and slots his on. Yakov watches him, then turns and walks to the rink’s tiny office room and Victor trails after him, pulling his ponytail out and letting his hair fall down his back.

Yakov points him to a chair across from a desk, then sits himself behind the desk. There are quite a lot of forms spread out across the surface that Victor recognizes as registration forms for various competitions. They’re arranged in vaguely organized piles according to event and Victor watches as Yakov dig through the pile for the Russian Nationals in January until he finds one with _Nikiforova_ written in neat script. The date of birth and ID numbers and all of the rest of Victor’s information is filled in, but his first name is absent.

“We are registering everyone for Nationals,” Yakov says briskly. “We have some things to discuss again before you sign your form.”

“Okay,” Victor says. He crosses his legs and leans back in his chair.

Yakov eyes him for a moment, then jumps right into it. “It’s time for you to decide which division you will compete in, men’s or women’s singles. There is no middle ground, you have to make the decision.”

Victor tenses up all over. He knew that this conversation would be happening again sooner or later, but every time he had thought of it, he had kind of hoped that it would be later.

“You may continue your career from the girls’ Junior division to the women’s Senior division, where I’m sure your career will move ahead as it has been so far,” Yakov continues dispassionately, like he’s reading the side effect list of a new medication. “Rapidly. If you transition to the men’s Senior division, it may be more difficult for you. In several ways.”

Victor nods and stares down into his lap. He tears at some split ends, flicking bits of hair away. It’s not like he hasn’t thought about what to do; it weighs on him constantly. Every time he puts on a sports bra in the shower at the rink, he contemplates doing it in front of the greats at a Grand Prix or a Worlds competition and feels kind of sick to his stomach.

Yakov watches him think, then taps the paper. “I know the Junior Grand Prix finals are preoccupying you,” he says, kindly (for Yakov). “You have until then to come to a decision. That’s five weeks. I need you to sign this form before we leave for Helsinki at the end of November.”

“Yes, Coach Yakov,” Victor says, obedient for once. He holds out his hand, and Yakov hands him the form. Victor skims over it; there’s little he hasn’t seen before. His last name and patronymic, his height and weight and ISU and Russian ID numbers, the events that he’s scheduled to be in only half filled in. The sex portion is left as blank as the first name box, waiting for Victor to make a decision about how the rest of his life will go.

“Senior nationals start on January fifth,” Yakov reminds him.

“I know.”

“You can’t switch back and forth between the two, either. You have to pick one and stick with it.”

“I know.”

Yakov nods. He looks a little gentler than usual, which means he only looks partly inflated. He holds out his hand and Victor hands the form back. Yakov returns it to the pile and covers it with another form for someone else - hers is already filled out, with her full name and everything. Victor feels a soft pang of jealously and swallows it. “That’s all. Back to practice. Your step sequence is looking choppy. You’d better not be binding again. You know I won’t hesitate you withdraw you from the Grand Prix. I don’t care how well you did in Budapest.”

“I’m not, I promise.” Victor stands up and ties his hair back, then walks inelegantly out of the office and back to the rink, his blade covers making loud thunking noises on the rubber mats.

He thinks about it as he practices his step sequences, which do not get any less choppy. He thinks about it as he walks back to his apartment in the commons with his skates slung over his shoulder. He thinks about it as he showers and drags himself through the same dinner as always - protein and salad and more protein - and does his stretches and lifts weights and watches TV on his new TV set. He goes into the bathroom and stares at his naked body in the mirror and covers his chest with his hands and turns from side to side. It would be very difficult for him to blend into the men’s figure skating crowd, but he already doesn’t belong in the women’s division either. He faces his reflection head-on and looks at his hips - slim, but wider than is ideal for his jumps. Victor likes his hips now. They’re somewhere between masculine and feminine and he likes the androgyny of them, and how they don’t ache as much as some of the girls on the Russian team who have wide hips and knee and back pain.

Victor draws himself into his free program’s starting position, back curved forward and to the right, one arm across his face, and peeks at himself from under his elbow. It’s a very hidden position. It distorts him, makes his body look different. Featureless. The curve of his chest is only distinguished because there’s no spandex covering it. Victor sighs and drops his arms, then leans against the sink and runs the tap. He washes his face with cold water and rests his elbows on the porcelaine. He thinks.

One option is a huge challenge, the other unbearable. One will wear down his body faster, and one will wear down his mind. Neither feel like particularly good options, but Victor meets his own gaze and he knows what he’s going to do.

He holds that decision with him for a while, to be sure that he’s sure, and Yakov doesn’t hound him about it, at practice or during his second Grand Prix event in Chemnitz. They make eye contact every now and then and Victor knows that Yakov is waiting. But Victor also knows that Yakov knows that this is a very, very important decision, and so he leaves Victor to it.

Two weeks before the Junior Grand Prix finals, Victor knocks on the door of the office after all the other skaters have left. The door doesn’t open, but there’s a grunt, so Victor goes in anyway.

Yakov looks up from where he’s hunched over more forms. “Vika.”

Victor frowns. “There’s no one else here. You don’t have to do that.”

Yakov sighs and nods. “Right. Vitya.”

“Thank you,” Victor says.

“Did you lose your apartment keys?”

“No, I wanted to finish my Russian Nationals form.”

Yakov’s shoulders stiffen, almost imperceptibly. “Very well.” He shuffles through a different stack than the one he’s working on until he finds Victor’s, then sets it down and pulls out a pen. “So?”

“I’m competing in the men’s division,” Victor tells him.

Yakov looks at the paper for a long time, and then looks up at Victor. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“It will be a great challenge to you,” Yakov says.

“I’m good at being challenged.”

“In skating, yes. Not so much personally.”

Victor doesn’t say anything. He jerks his chin at the form.

Yakov sighs and nods. “Very well. We’ll have to adjust your training regimen after the Junior Grand Prix finals.” He writes _male_ into the sex section, and _men’s singles_ in the program boxes. “You’ll have to change your form quite a bit, and you’ll be working out more.”

“I can handle it,” Victor says.

Yakov nods. He looks grim, but not disappointed or unhappy. “What name do you want for Russian Nationals?”

“Victor,” Victor says.

Yakov writes that in too, then scratches out the _-a_ at the end of his last name and the _-на_ at the end of his patronymic, and scans over the form. Then he turns it around and pushes it toward Victor. “Read and sign.”

Victor reads. His heart trips a little just looking at the phrase _men’s short program_. He’ll be in that in two months. He’ll spend his seventeenth birthday training for the men’s singles division. He feels dizzy at the prospect of it. Dizzy and afraid and excited and overwhelmed.

He signs.

“Thank God, now I can get these in to the FFKK,” Yakov says, like Victor hasn’t just irrevocably changed his life forever.

“Is that everything?” Victor asks quietly.

“Yes.” Yakov gets a big manila folder and starts sifting through forms, stowing away all of the Russian Nationals ones. “Go home, Vitya. Get to bed. You have an early day tomorrow.”

“Yes, Coach Yakov,” Victor says. He stands up and feels like he’s still on his bare blades. His legs are wobbly and unsteady as he picks up his duffel bag and his skates and walks out of the office. The walk home takes no time at all, and when he gets home, Victor drops himself face first onto his bed and has a panic attack.

 

On December 5th, Victoriya Nikiforova wins gold at the Junior Grand Prix final in Helsinki, Finland.

Victor ditches the banquet and throws the medal in his suitcase, then throws it in a box at home and doesn’t look at it for years.

~

Yakov Feltsman sends three men, two women, and one set each for pairs figure skating and ice dancing from Yubileyny to the 2005 Russian National Championships.

Andrei and Evgeni are in their twenties. Ksenia and Katarina are too, though not so far in. Victor walks close behind them, barely level with the women and over half a foot shorter than the other men, hunching his shoulders as much as he can without dropping his duffel bag. He’s on his home turf right now - he practices in Yubileyny nearly every day, but Yakov leads the five of them out on the second day of competition and it feels like every pair of eyes is turned on him.

“Vitya,” Katarina hisses over her shoulder. “Stand up straight.”

Victor straightens up like his back is made of steel. A man from CSKA Moscow narrows his eyes at him as he passes, then whispers something to the women next to him. Victor tries and fails not to watch them in his peripheral vision.

Yakov walks them to a place in the stands and orders them to sit down. Victor ends up squished between Andrei and Evgeni, which is more comforting than it really should be, even though his eyes barely pass their shoulders. Yakov looks at them all wordlessly, then takes the ladies down for check-in, leaving Victor and the others alone.

Andrei nudges him with his elbow. “Are you nervous, Vitya?”

Victor, who feels like he might throw up if he opens his mouth for any reason, just nods.

“Don’t be. Just do your programs like you did in the Junior Grand Prix. It’s just the same, except your competitors are taller now.” Andrei gives him a reassuring smile and Victor’s mouth replies in kind, but his mind is off several rows back where he can hear someone whisper the word _Nikiforova_.

The men’s short program isn’t until the evening, and the rest of the day before it is a special kind of torture. Victor watches the women’s group A warming up and has a strange sort of cognitive dissonance that he’s not there. Katarina does a jump that Victor had fought for months to land cleanly - her foot wobbles and her exit is a little too tight, but she skates on through it. Victor has the quiet, jealous thought that that should be him, and then the louder, nauseated thought of putting on a spandex dress and competing in the women’s division again.

Ksenia crushes the short program, coming in over seven points higher than second place. Katarina lands poorly on the jump and falls. She gets up and keeps skating, but her knee is clearly bruised and Yakov helps her walk to the kiss and cry at the end of it. She comes in tenth of fifteen. She smiles like she isn’t devastated.

“Hey, Nikiforova,” someone says behind Evgeni.

Victor turns like he’s on a string and the skater from Sokolniki is pulling it. Evgeni turns too, and Victor is briefly glad that Evgeni is four inches taller than him, because it gives him a little bit of a shield against the other skater.

“Why aren’t you competing? I thought you moved up to Seniors after the Junior Grand Prix Final.”

“I did,” Victor says. “I’m competing in the men’s division now.”

The skater - Victor thinks his name is Denis but wouldn’t bet a ruble on it - looks Victor up and down, then hesitantly says, “Okay.”

“Are you worried he’s going to beat you?” Evgeni says, cold as the rink. “You’ve been beaten by a seventeen year old before.”

The skater looks at him and his jaw sets. “You’d have better luck on your own program if you spent more time on your triple flip and less time being Nikiforova’s big brother.”

“Nikiforov,” Victor corrects softly, mostly for himself.

Evgeni’s nostrils flare. Andrei reaches around Victor’s head to rest a hand on Evgeni’s shoulder. “Zhenya.”

Evgeni looks at him, then back at the skater, then jerks his head and looks away again. The skater falters, then scowls and turns away.

“Ignore him,” Andrei says, to both of them.

“Asshole,” Evgeni mutters.

Victor’s mouth has forgotten how words work.

 

He gets placed in group B, the second eight of sixteen. Andrei and Evgeni are in group A. They change into their costumes in the locker room and Victor doesn’t remember the last time he felt this anxious before a competition.

Andrei seems to notice, because he hip-checks Victor into a corner, then starts stretching his limbs out widely like a shield as he pulls parts of his costume on. Victor watches him for a second, confused, until Andrei hisses, “Hurry up and get dressed.” Victor quickly digs into his bag and strips away his clothes. He holds up his costume - the same from the Junior Grand Prix, but with the tulle of the skirt cut off and hemmed in so it’s just the leotard. He stands there staring at it in a sports bra and a thin pair of underwear and thick socks until Andrei not-so-subtly kicks his foot back into Victor’s calf.

Victor scrambles into his costume leotard, and then tugs on the pants they’d had made for Nationals. The sewing isn’t the best, but it had been done at very short notice. They’re rather high waisted, which helps hide the old skirt seams. Victor is quietly grateful that he’d been given long sleeves this year.

As soon as Andrei sees that Victor’s pants are on, he sighs and drops down onto the bench next to him to pull on his skates. Victor digs in his bag for a small hand mirror and shoves gel in his hair, then combs it back and pulls it all into an elastic so it can’t get in his face. He looks at himself, and the unusual lack of makeup that someone usually puts him in, the high neck of his leotard and the subtle bags under his eyes, and finds that he looks just as different as he feels.

Someone comes over the loudspeaker, announcing that warmups are going to start soon. Andrei quickly jams his warmup pants and shoes into his bag and tucks the bag under the bench, then claps Victor on the shoulder. “See you out there,” he says. “Cheer for me louder than Evgeni?”

“Hey!” Evgeni calls from behind a set of lockers.

“He’s a world champion. I need it more.”

Victor laughs for the first time all day.

Evgeni emerges, bedecked in black and silver and white sparkles. He helps Andrei up, and the two of them slip out of the locker room with six other skaters, leaving Victor sitting alone.

He sits on the bench as the rest of the skaters filter out. Almost all of them give him curious glances; no one approaches him, but a couple whisper to each other, confused. Victor doesn’t look at any of them. He jiggles his blades to make sure they’re mounted, as if they ever haven’t been, blows his nose, reties his shoes, toys with his hair. He waits and he listens until there are no other people in the locker room, and then he takes a deep breath in, holds it, and lets it out slowly. He can do this. It’s just like the Junior Grand Prix Finals, except everyone is taller.

That doesn’t help with the fact that, when he comes out of the locker room and group A is warming up, he still has to sit alone.

 

Evgeni finishes his short program comfortably and cleanly. Andrei does alright. Victor watches, rapt, leaning against the audience barriers, as skater after skater pulls off a quad or two each. Victor has only tried one quad while building his programs, a toe loop, but several people land quad Salchows too. Victor frowns and leans his head against his hand, mentally redoing the math for his program. He can change a triple toe loop to a quad toe loop in the first half of his program, and a double in his combination to a second triple. He can do the jumps on their own, and the combinations okay, but Yakov had yelled at him until he was purple last time Victor tried to add a quad to his routine in Juniors, so Victor doesn’t have very much practice with it yet.

“Hey, kid,” someone says as they walk past him. “Skates on.”

Victor looks up and sees that the last skater of group A is sitting in the kiss and cry, waiting for his score. He quickly kicks his shoes off and pulls his skates on, lacing them up and then redoing it until they feel right with the pants.

He walks down the stairs awkwardly, and Yakov is waiting for him. He’s talking to Andrei, who’s chugging a water bottle, and Evgeni, whose arms are crossed, and the three of them turn to look at him when he approaches. There must be something in his face, because Yakov brushes between the two of them and places both hands on Victor’s shoulders. He meets Victor’s eyes. He looks at only what Victor wants him, wants anyone, to see. “Vitya,” he says seriously. “You will be fine.”

 

Victor goes out and skates.

He wobbles on his quad toe loop, but he doesn’t fall.

He ends his short program in fifth and he doesn’t remember a single second of it beyond determined adrenaline lifting him up.

 

Victor is glad that Nationals are in Saint Petersburg this year, because it means he can go back to his apartment instead of hotel and have a complete breakdown.

 

Waiting on luck as never been Victor’s style, and neither has wishing ill on anyone else, but he sits in the stands with his fingers knotted together and silently hopes for every jump to become a touch down. Falls still scare him - Katarina jokes that that’s why he’s so good, his body won’t let him fall so he just floats along the ice like magic - and he doesn’t wish them on anyone, but every hand that hits the ice after a triple axel brings him a little farther away from being a mockery. The scrutiny will be intense either way, but if he can dig his fingers into the ranks and drag himself up, maybe it won’t be as painful as it could be.

Five skaters before him touch down. Four fall (Andrei). Two fall twice (Andrei). One skates perfectly, with quads in combinations (Evgeni). Yakov is as delighted as he’s capable of being.

He holds Victor’s shoulders again, right before Victor’s free program starts, when Victor is standing on the ice while the previous scores are being read out and and Victor has just finished his quick warm up lap and Victor is shaking so hard he has to clench his jaw shut. “Vitya,” he says again. “You will be fine.”

“Yakov,” Victor says softly.

“You will,” Yakov says. Softly.  “You will.”

The loudspeaker blares.

_Next in the men’s free skate, representing Yubileyny Sports Club, Vict– Victor Nikiforov, age seventeen._

Victor takes a breath in and lets it out, slow. Yakov squeezes his shoulder.

“Skate well.”

Victor nods, and then skates out to the center of the ice. He waves to all the people he can’t see in the stands and then skids to a stop in the center of the rink. His back curves forward and to the right. One arm is held across his face. His body is featureless under the cascading blue and red gradient of his leotard top. He is seventeen and competing in the men’s free skate and he is Victor Nikiforov.

He does not wobble on his quad. He turns his double jump combination into a triple jump combination with an extra double Lutz without telling Yakov beforehand. He beats his previous personal best by a ridiculous fifteen points. The crowd, which had been unsteady and quiet and confused during his short program, whispering _Nikiforova?_ back and forth, roars with applause.

Yakov hugs him when he comes off the ice panting and sweating and red. Victor would usually make some sort of comment about this, but he just buries his face in Yakov’s chest and tries to breathe as Yakov’s arms wrap around his back.

Yakov keeps an arm wrapped firmly around Victor’s shoulders in the kiss and cry. Victor stares up at the blurry, pixelated screen, which is replaying his quad toe loop. It looks so incredibly different than his triple toe loop in the Junior Grand Prix final. His hair flares out behind him in a sharp slash of silver, and everything else is smooth. Featureless.

He crashes into third to a scream of applause and Yakov clapping him firmly on the back. Victor breaks out into a grin, and then he laughs, and then he cries while he laughs. Yakov pretends not to notice as he wipes his face with the sleeve of his costume, but tears and laugher and bubbling joy keep coming out of him and he can’t make any of it stop.

The two group B skaters after Victor do just fine, but their positions from the short program mean their free skates don’t propel them up to podium levels. Victor skates out into the spotlight next to Evgeni and a skater named Sergei from Moskvich and tilts his head up as a medal presenter places a bronze around his neck and flowers in his arms. His body is crackling and alive with energy as Evgeni wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him against his side and grins at the flash of cameras that light up the ice. This picture will be in the news tomorrow, probably, and Victor’s name will be attached to it. His real name. The name on his Nationals badge. Not his outdated last name and his garbled patronymic.

Sunday’s papers are confused, but happy. They mention Victor as the Junior Ladies’ Grand Prix champion. But they call him _Victor_ , and they call him _he_ and they call him _prodigy_ and _up and coming_ and _bronze medalist_ and _the future of men’s singles in Russia_. On Monday, the first day back at practice, Yakov tosses him today’s copy of the _Delovoy_ and Victor sees a picture of himself tucked under Evgeni’s arm with a huge bouquet of flower and a bright grin and his name, _Victor Nikiforov_ , underneath. Victor smiles privately and tucks it in his duffel bag, but when he gets back to his apartment, he tapes it up on the wall so he can see it every day.

~

He makes it to Europeans and comes in nineteenth.

~

“Vitya!” Yakov bellows. It echoes around the ice. Victor looks up from practicing his step sequence, which is less choppy than it used to be, and shoves hair out of his face again. Yakov doesn’t demand that he come to the office, but he’s holding a couple sheets of paper. The sight of them makes Victor’s heart squeeze in his chest as he skates over.

He wipes ice off his blades and slides his guards on, then clacks over to Yakov, who does look angry this time. A couple other skaters look over curiously, then look away before Yakov can catch them.

“Yes, Coach Yakov?” Victor says, reaching for his warmup jacket and draping it over his shoulders.

“I have received a letter from the FFKK,” Yakov says.

“Oh.”

“About your registration for Junior Worlds.”

“Oh,” again, quieter.

“Here.” Yakov hands him the paper. Victor takes it and scans it over.

 

_To Yakov Feltsman,_

 

_We are writing in regards to your registration submission for the Junior World Championships in Canada from February 28th to March 6, 2005. You have submitted a registration form for Nikiforov _Victor Dmitriyevich_  (formerly Nikiforova  _Victoriya Dmitriyevna_ ). Nikiforov’s debut in the Russian National Championship has established him as a skater in the men’s divisions, and as such, he cannot be allowed to participate in the Ladies’ Junior World Championships. Furthermore…_

 

Victor scans the letter a couple of times, his stomach flipping oddly inside of him. He looks up at Yakov, whose arms are crossed and face is red, and then holds the paper out. “So.”

“They’ve banned you from Junior Worlds,” Yakov says acidly. “As a men’s division skater, you can’t compete in the ladies’ competitions, but as a ladies’ Junior competition winner, you can’t compete in the men’s Junior competitions.” He seems to be seething.

“And Senior Worlds?” Victor asks hesitantly.

“You’re registered for that,” Yakov says shortly. “In Russia’s last spot. But you won’t be traveling to Canada anymore.”

Victor nods. “Okay.”

Yakov stares at him in disbelief, then folds the paper up roughly and shoves it into his pocket. He mutters something about making phone calls to the FFKK and stomps off, shouting at a Junior as he falls out of a double toe loop, and slams a door behind him. Victor watches him leave, then slowly turns and walks back to the rink. He pulls his guards off and leaves them on the wall, then skates along the edge of the ice for a few laps, thinking.

A part of him aches. It’s the part that spent two and a half years in Juniors ripping records apart and winning gold medals. It’s the part that snuck outside of banquet halls with fifteen year old girls and giggled over half a glass of stolen champagne. It’s the secret, shameful part that was a little scared of moving up to men’s Seniors, that knew that many skaters before him had competed in Juniors and Seniors simultaneously and skaters after him will do it too and that he had a safety net of victory and gold thread in case the first year went wrong.

The rest of him, though.

He rereads the letter in his head as he passes a couple practicing a triple throw. He is Victor Nikiforov, and only _formerly_ Nikiforova. He’s established as a skater in the men’s division now. And he can’t go back. Not from fear, not from backlash, not from hidden rules from the invention of the ISU a hundred years ago. No one can make him go back.

“Vitya, what are you grinning about?” Maxim, the man from one of the pair skating couples, asks him as he drifts by again.

“What? Oh. Nothing,” Victor says. “Just thinking about Worlds.”

~

Victor comes eighth in Worlds. A piece of his heart breaks as he watches Evgeni share a podium with a Swiss man named Stéphane, who won gold and shook Victor’s hand and complimented his triple axel after the short program, and an American man who Victor doesn’t know the name of. They look very picturesque standing there with their flags wrapped around their shoulders, flowers in their hands and medals between their teeth.

Victor hadn’t skated badly. He’d landed his jumps and barely lost his balance only twice after his triple loops. The others were just… better. They have more quads than him and more stamina than him and more height than him. He’s over thirty points off of first at the end of it, and it’s an amazing score for him but it’s not an amazing score for the others. The men in front of him skated cleanly and had great execution; the ones behind him touched down and fell and suffered too many deductions. Victor never fell, and he sits in eighth.

And even sitting in eighth in the world, he doesn’t think he’s ever felt so mediocre in his life.

~

World’s is the end of Victor’s season, so Yakov gives him a couple weeks off this year. There are other, less important and non-ISU related competitions, but Evgeni is the best Russia has to offer so he goes to them instead. Victor tries to watch Evgeni skate on TV in his new apartment, but he can’t find a channel on his limited cable package that’s showing it, so he lies in bed until he gets too restless and then practices the motions of a quad flip until he falls on his ass and the people who live under him bang on the ceiling with something and yell at him to be quiet.

When he gets back, Yakov is waiting. Victor tells him that he’s going to learn the flip and Yakov nods and ropes Evgeni into teaching him. He stands rinkside and glowers as Evgeni holds Victor in position, correcting aspects of his takeoff form and making him do it again and again, doing triples instead of quads until he thinks Victor can start it right. Victor falls, and falls and falls and falls - his side is bruised from his knee up to his ribs, and breathing as he lies down on the ice feels like breathing with bandages on. Evgeni helps him up and then makes him do it again. Victor falls. Yakov growls and walks off to watch someone else.

Victor uses a handheld video camera to film Evgeni. He’s taller than Victor is, and he makes the jump look more elegant than Victor’s triple flips do. Victor follows after him, camera in his hands, as Evgeni does quad flip after quad flip so he can get multiple angles. Then they carry it over to an outlet and plug it in and rewatch on the tiny screen. Evgeni is grace personified, even in his track pants and sweater. Victor wonders if he’s ever looked like that.

He watches the videos at home, and then at practice the next day. He does his required step sequences with everyone else, then goes off to the end of the rink and practice again. He falls and it hurts. He lands it and it hurts. He lands it again and he falls again and he lands and his landing knee makes irritated noises at him and he hushes it. He lies on the ice for twenty minutes because it’s the best alternative to an ice pack that he has available, and then he gets back up and takes off and falls and lands it and lands it and lands it.

The quad flip becomes a bit of an obsession. The Grand Prix series doesn’t start until November this year and he has six months until then. Yakov doesn’t usually start with new programs until the end of the season, anyway, so Victor has no new material. He only has the quad flip and increasingly tired muscles and a haunting feeling of mediocrity that follows him around every time he sees another man skate.

In June, his success rate is up to about two thirds of the time, so he shows Yakov. His runup is long, to get enough speed - he’ll have to work on shortening it - but the jump is clean and so is the landing and Victor skates in a lazy circle back to him. Younger skaters might not be able to read Yakov so easily, but Victor can tell that he’s proud.

“It’s good, Vitya,” he says. “How often can you land it?”

“Most of the time,” Victor says.

“Noted. We’ll think about adding one into your free skate for next season,” Yakov says. Victor pales a little, then stands up straighter and nods. It’s his quad flip now. He can do it whenever he wants.

Except the next time, when he pops it, overcorrects, and falls on his ass again.

~

“Grand Prix schedules are out,” Yakov announces to a milling crowd of a dozen or so skaters. They all look up at him like children during story time as he shuffles through sheets of paper. “Ksenya, you’re at Skate America and Rostelecom this year. Zhenya, Skate America and Skate Canada. Aleksis, Andorra Cup and Baltic Cup. Nika, Tallinn and Sofia…” He reads them off of a clipboard as each skater comes up and gets their assignments. They drop onto benches one by one, reading over the dates and locations of each cup competition. Victor leans against the barrier and waits, until it’s only him and Yakov and two sheets of paper left.

“Vitya, you’re at the Trophée and the NHK this year.” Yakov hands him one of the sheets of paper.

 

_Nikiforov, Victor Dmitriyevich_

_Coach: Feltsman, Yakov_

_Assignments_

_Trophée Éric Bompard: 17-20 November, 2005 (Paris, France)_

_NHK Trophy: 1-4 December, 2005 (Osaka, Japan)_

 

_Grand Prix Finals: 16-18 December, 2005 (Tokyo, Japan)_

_Hotel Accommodations_

_…_

 

Victor reads over the paper, then looks up at Yakov and nods. “Not terrible.” Yakov nods once, then hands Victor the other paper. It has official FFKK letterhead and the content itself is short. Victor scans through the first line, then looks up again. “You tried to register me for the men’s Junior Grand Prix series?”

“I did,” Yakov says.

“And I’m banned.”

“You’re banned.”

“Why bother?” Victor asks.

“Because you are an excellent skater, Vitya,” Yakov says. “And you could have done it.” He turns back to the rest of the skaters, stalking between benches, muttering about how much flying he’s going to have to do this fall. Victor watches him as one of the Juniors, Veronika, asks about something or other on her form and folds the assignment sheet and the letter up and stuffs them both into his pocket.

At home, the assignment page gets taped to the wall in Victor’s bedroom, next to some newspaper articles and pictures. The letter from the FFKK goes into the trash.

~

In July, choreography starts again. Yakov has hour long pre-choreographer meetings with everyone the first week of the season, going over jumps that can be included and potential songs for short programs and season themes and costumes. Victor drapes himself over the chair in the office and rattles off his jumps - his quad Salchow is good enough most of the time that he includes it, and his triple axel and quad flip are a little iffy from time to time but he adds them too. There are rumors that someone is preparing to unveil a quad Lutz, but Victor’s never even seen one, let alone tried it. Yakov draws up a technical outline that Victor can fit choreography around and underlines _4S_ a couple times. “Have you picked your theme?”

Victor tilts his head back, looking at the ceiling, hair falling down the back of the chair. “Surprises, perhaps.”

“Surprises.”

“It’s my first full season in Seniors. Surely if I do well, everyone will be surprised.” He gives Yakov a dry smile, then drops his head back again.

Yakov glowers. “Themes tend to be more than misplaced self-deprecation, Vitya. You don’t have anything better?”

“I don’t know,” Victor says. “I want to be a surprise. Isn’t that enough to put on a show?” He pulls his legs off of the arm of the chair and sits up straighter. “I don’t want anyone to know about the Salchow until Paris.”

“You’re not the only men’s skater with a Salchow,” Yakov points out.

“But I’ve never done one in competition,” Victor says. “Before Nationals, you never even let me do a quad in competition.”

“You _know_ we don’t let Juniors do quads competitively–”

“And I’m not allowed to be a Junior anymore, Yakov. If that’s what they all expect from me, a Junior’s program, then I’ll be delighted to prove them wrong.”

Victor doesn’t look delighted about anything. He looks determined, the blue of his eyes dulling into something icy and present. He leans forward a little, meeting Yakov’s gaze. Yakov is too old to be stared down, so when he looks back at his notebook, it’s no concession. “Costumes.”

Victor groans. “New pants.”

“They were last minute, stop whining. New pants, fine. Color scheme?”

“I was thinking something dark blue, and black,” Victor says. “Maybe white edges. Something… ethereal.”

“You’re a boy, Vitya, not an angel,” Yakov says wryly.

“No one else needs to know that,” Victor says. “And I want sleeves.” A costume is already beginning to take form in his head, feathery and deep blue like night. Form fitting, perhaps, but not white and fluffy like his old Juniors costume. Something dark and elegant and otherworldly, without being something on an American holiday card. “Maybe I’ll draw you up some sketches.”

“You can’t draw,” Yakov points out.

“I’ll skate you a sketch.”

That makes Yakov chuckle. “Take a picture when you do.”

 

Victor buys a new notebook and doodles in it at night. He and Yakov have settled on the basic jump outlines for him - both his short program and his free skate are going to start with his quad Salchow because Yakov doesn’t think that he’ll have the stamina to pull it off later in the program and Victor can’t disagree with him. Victor had been run down into agreeing to start his combinations with toe loops instead. It’s not as flashy, everyone does a quad toe loop in combination. It’s the easiest quad to do, and people before Victor have mastered it and put two or even a failed third in their short programs. Victor feels mildly bitter at his own body and puts on a looser sweater so that he doesn’t have to think about the shape of it. He runs for longer and longer each day, but it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference.

 

 _4S, back+chsq to the other end of the rink, uSp (scratch?)_  
~~ch st~~  
_~~3T+2T~~ 3T+3T? _  
_Spread eagle into fsSp (or att.)_  
_~~3Lz~~ _  
_~~4T~~ _  
_3Lz_  
_ch st_  
_cSp+ccSp_  
_biellmann? or co sp_  
_3Lo_  
_end: upright 2foot?_

 

He sketches out a vague idea of the costume that he can see in his mind. The first version looks too much like a dress. He draws two thin legs underneath it and colors them in with a pencil and that looks a little better, but not much. Andrei is competing in a suit, or a costume that looks like one. Victor thinks about the cut of a suit and draws a notch up in the front of his doodle. It makes it look a little less like a dress and a little more like a jacket that someone regal might wear. Victor smiles and sketches in little feathery lines on one side, then colors in the other arm. He erases it, then colors it in again, then erases it again. Uncolored, it looks too balanced, but colored, it looks too severe. Neither of them look right.

Others are doing similar things. Some of them throw themselves at the mercy of hired costume designers, and some of them like to work out a vision for someone with a sewing machine to implement. Victor compares drawings with Katarina, who’s going for a very strappy sort of thing this year. Victor feels very uncomfortable at the idea of showing so much of the skin of his back and sides and chest, but he kind of likes the look of the thick black lines criss-crossing themselves. He remembers how much he was teased in his last Junior season for his full black costume; they called him a dominatrix in training, which made the Victoryia mask wink in public and Victor roll his eyes. Katarina’s costume reminds him of a sexier, older version of that, and it’s not a bad look, but one that Victor can only hold a part of at the time.

Katarina takes her pen and draws some criss-crosses over the erased arm of Victor’s doodle. “There, we’ll match. We can walk in at the finals like some sort of power couple.”

“You’re much older than me, Katyushka,” Victor says. He doesn’t say that he doesn’t think that Katarina has much chance of ever making it to the finals.

“Ugh, don’t remind me.” She ruffles Victor’s hair. “I like the whole off center thing. It throws people off.”

That makes Victor smile a little. “Maybe I’ll keep it like that, then.”

“You’re gonna look like a little angel prince,” Katarina teases. “I wonder what headlines they’ll give you.”

Victor sticks his tongue out and makes a face. Katarina laughs, but Victor thinks that he might not mind headlines like those.

 

That kills pretty much all of his fashion design inspiration, so he submits to some designers coming in and showing him pre-made bases for the short program costume. Something simpler and more masculine, they suggest. Leave the flair for the free skate. People won’t be expecting such a dramatic shift. Victor feels himself being swayed and he’s helpless to stop it. They suggest a simple dark blue shirt, the same color as Victor’s design, with black detailing across the front, and black pants, and offer to do some white accents, to keep it all thematic. Victor imagines ripping out of it into his free skate costume and smiles a little to himself and lets them.

They make him take off his clothes and flit around him with a measuring tape. Victor has always hated this part, but now, it feels even worse. Fingers holding the edge of the tape skim across his chest and Victor flinches and bites his tongue and swallows it down. Fingers touch his sides and hips, quickly and professionally smoothing down his underwear to get a cleaner measurement. Hands touch his shoulders and turn him around and a man in his mid twenties kneels in front of Victor to measure his leg down to the ankle. It puts his head roughly crotch height and Victor instinctively shoves him away with his knee. The man falls and looks up, confused, and Victor’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth but no excuses come out.

Luckily, the man is professional and makes a light comment about how his hands must be cold, He shifts over to Victor’s side to continue the measuring, and even though that’s still unpleasant, it doesn’t have quite the same level of horrible, invading scrutiny, so Victor gnaws at the inside of his cheek and lets it happen.

When they finish, he doesn’t even go back to the rink. They read him the numbers and he agrees without listening, and then they go away and he goes to the showers. He gets body wash from his locker, which is Old Spice and shamefully purchased from import stores because it smells pleasantly masculine to Victor and probably no one else, and scrubs at himself for ten minutes until his skin is pink. Worse than the fingers, he can feel eyes on him again, looking at _him_ and not his _skating_ or anything else he can control. The design team knows Victor - hell, they’d sewn his Nationals pants _and_ his Junior Grand Prix dresses - and still, he hides in the shower until he feels like he can be looked at again.

When he gets out and dries off, he pulls on his big sweatshirt and baggy running pants and shoes and stuffs his gear into his duffel bag, then announces to Yakov that he’s leaving for the day. There’s still two hours of practice left, but Yakov sees something in his face and lets him go with only a minor yelling fit. Victor runs home, but when he gets there, he realizes that a consequence of running is sweating and he can’t stand to look at himself for long enough to take another shower. So he closes his eyes and puts on clean clothes that immediately get sweaty again and cover everything but his face and hands and he sits on the couch and watches movies until he falls asleep.

In the late evening, when he finally wakes up, he feels sticky and hot and disgusting, like he’s wearing a second skin made of sweat. His notebook is on the table and he opens it up. After several pages of scratched out short programs, he finds his free skate costume sketch and his stomach sinks. Why he ever thought it could look like a jacket, he doesn’t know. It looks like a dress, for a girl pretending to be a boy in the men’s Senior division. Victor rips it out and crumples it up and throws it across the room, and then stares at a blank piece of paper for an hour until he admits that he has no other ideas. The ball of paper sits on the floor, mocking him, until Victor throws it out the window of his apartment and slams the window shut and showers in the dark.

The next day, he feels a little bit like he has a hangover, but other than that, he feels better.

~

July rolls into August and programs start to take shape. Songs and medleys get traded around like money - Victor hears that someone in the Juniors is considering The Swan for their short program and suddenly Yakov is making him listen to it. Victor listens to it through scratchy headphones, hums it all through practice, and by the time he comes to Yakov and asks if he can have it, the Junior has moved on already to something more 90’s American pop.

Notebooks and scraps of paper litter the barrier walls. Pens fall down onto the ice and are retrieved by someone skating past. Every sheet of paper has the same incomprehensible jumble of letters and numbers and names detailing program components. The speakers are active at all times, repeating a playlist of all the short program songs that people have put in so far. Every time someone’s song comes up, they’ll stop what they’re doing, drop into a stance, and then skate out the first forty-five seconds that they have worked out and them go back to their notebook and rearrange jumps. The trash bins are full of crumpled up papers, and it’s comforting to see them. It means that creation is happening, and it makes Victor feel settled, even as he scrambles into position when his music pops up on the playlist.

Choreographers are herded in like cattle. Some come from far away - everyone wants to choreograph for Evgeni and Ksenia, and a few people have their eyes on Victor as well - and some are from the Bolshoi and some are just dance instructors with a reputation and a clean eye. Victor had his programs mostly choreographed for him in Juniors, but as a Senior skater, he’s supposed to be allowed more input. A former ballerina from the Bolshoi makes a sequence for his short program and it looks like a dance. Victor did as much ballet as any Russian skater does, but dance was never his strong suit. He takes her choreography, rips the dance studio floor out from under it, and turns it into something beautiful that he understands.

Yakov’s wife Lilia comes to watch. She too was a ballerina for the Bolshoi, but she’s not choreographing this year, or so Yakov says. Lilia stalks around, snapping at skaters and choreographers alike, correcting positioning and suggesting changes to jump composition and step sequences. She makes a couple of the younger Juniors cry, but no one can deny that every program she touches gets a little neater and a little more beautiful. Yakov looks mildly embarrassed about it, and horrified when a thirteen year old girl cries on him, but he allows Lilia to come back in two weeks and harass everyone who hasn’t improved.

(Victor likes Lilia. She lets him come have dinner with her and Yakov for New Years when everyone else is with their families, and she gives him glasses of wine even though Yakov forbids him from drinking during the season. She’s strict and brutally honest, but has only ever shown him kindness, in her prickly way.)

Victor builds his short program pretty quickly, but his free skate is more of an issue. The short program is soft, which is okay and Victor can pull it off well, but he wants something different for the free. He wants dueling programs, each startling the other with the abrupt shift in tone. He has a jump framework and little else, because none of the music is speaking to him. His choreographer looks like she’s about three seconds from throwing her notebook on the ground when he rejects her music suggestion for the fifth time.

“What is it you’re looking for, Victor?” she asks, turning the page and writing his base jumps in again. “What are these choices not giving you?”

“I don’t _know_ yet,” Victor says, quietly frustrated. “Where are you getting _your_ ideas from? They’re so operatic.”

They argue about it and Victor promises to go home and think about it. His choreographer grumbles about him just writing his program himself, but she lets him hug her to put himself back in her good graces and it works pretty easily.

Then Evgeni shatters his kneecap.

Victor watches him practicing his free skate, which is bouncing between a few different songs with similar rhythms. Right now, the speakers are playing the Godfather theme on repeat - it’s early, and there are only a few of them there, and Evgeni had commandeered the CD player by being taller than everyone else and also the best skater in the world. He lets the song run its course, then skates to the middle of the ice for the next repetition. Victor has seen this program before - it’s incredibly jump heavy, and will probably break records if done properly. Quiet jealousy smoulders inside him as Evgeni pulls his hand back and turns into his first jump lead-in.

It’s supposed to be a combination - a quad toe loop, a triple toe loop, and a double loop - but Evgeni only makes it to the quad. He over rotates and his skate catches as he lands and pitches him forward. Evgeni falls like he’s in slow motion and lands the entire brunt of his weight onto his left knee. There’s a cracking sound that Victor can feel in his chest, then then Evgeni bellows a curse word and punches the ice several times. Victor stares in horror as Evgeni rolls into his side, still shouting, and a Junior skates across the rink to kneel down in front of him. Evgeni’s looking pale and his face is twisted in pain; Victor can’t really handle looking at him, so he gets off the ice and practically runs in his skate guards to the office. Yakov’s not there, but some administrator is, and he demands that she call an ambulance for Evgeni. They can hear the faint echoes of his yells down the hall.

Evgeni is diagnosed with a comminuted patellar fracture. Yakov is gone all day and everyone kind of stays away from the spot where Evgeni fell, like it’s cursed. No one plays music, and the only sounds are people whispering and grunting and panting as they quiety work on their programs.

Yakov returns the next day and announces that Evgeni is having surgery and will miss most, if not all, of this season. He says that the songs Evgeni was practicing with are now up for grabs, if anyone wants them. He has tired eyes. Everyone is quiet as he speaks, and afterwards, they all murmur, “Yes, Coach Yakov,” and disperse.

Victor hangs back and watches for a moment. He leans against the barrier and Yakov leans next to him. “It’s a big loss,” Victor says. “His program was looking so good.”

“He tried to put in too much,” Yakov says shortly.

“Eventually, too much will just be enough.”

“Not this year.” Yakov’s eyes watch Ksenia as she skates backwards into a butterfly jump and a camel spin. “With Zhenya gone, you’ve moved up on the list of top male Russian figure skaters.”

“Have I?”

“Bronze in Nationals and eighth in Worlds. It’s not nothing at all. Andrei didn’t even make Worlds, and the next best Russian man was fourteenth.”

“So… what? Am I double-competing in the Grand Prix?”

“No, but there is a possibility that you’ll be put on the official Olympic team,” Yakov says.

“I– what?”

“Russia sends two men and two women for singles figure skating,” Yakov says. “And six pairs. And you have to be ready for the possibility that, with Zhenya out, you will be the one selected to fill in his place.”

“Can that happen?” Victor asks wondrously. “I thought teams were already official.”

“Not until the month before the games. We’re not sending someone with a broken knee, so the Olympic selection committee will work with the FFKK to pick someone from their provisional list to send in his place.”

“I’m on the provisional list?”

“Of course you are, stupid boy.” Yakov ruffles his hair. Victor grunts and pulls his elastic out so he can wrestle all the stray hairs back into place. “Were you not listening when you came in third in Nationals?”

Victor shakes his head a little.

“Stupid boy,” Yakov mutters again, laced with fondness. “Train hard. Let the FFKK see what you can do if you want to make the Olympic team.”

“Are they coming here? To watch training?”

“They could. They could be here right now.” Yakov raises one eyebrow, conspiratory, and Victor laughs.

“Okay, okay. I will.” He stands up and starts to take off his guards again, but Yakov grabs his bicep lightly.

“Vitya.”

“Yes?”

“Try your free skate to the Godfather.”

“Should I?”

“I wouldn’t tell you to do it if I thought it was a bad idea,” Yakov grunts. He stomps off toward the CD player and gestures at Victor to get out on the ice. Victor does and picks a quarter of the rink that only has one other person in it. Then the Godfather starts playing and Victor quickly runs through his notebook page of program components in his head. Or, maybe he could just…

He starts out like he would, like he has been, but when it comes time for his triple axel, he heaves himself up into a quad toe loop again, and then a triple toe loop. He doesn’t add the double loop at the end, he’s not stupid, but it feels good and clean. He hears Yakov’s outraged screech of _“Victor!”_ from across the ice and grins to himself, then carries on into a spin like he hasn’t heard anything. The music swells up and Victor compares it to his short program music and decides that this is very much the sort of transition he would like to make during a Grand Prix final.

~

Costumes are delivered in waves in August. The Juniors’ costumes come first, because the Junior Grand Prix starts earlier. Victor watches them run out of the locker rooms and on the ice one by one in sparkly dresses and clingy shirts and pants with cutaway holes along the sides and ruffles and smiles to himself. He feels a little off, to not be out there with them, but he’ll be there soon, without a skirt this time.

His costumes come at the end of the month, when Yakov isn’t even there to judge them. He’s already in Bratislava for the first Junior Grand Prix event. Everyone is mildly surprised when designers come in with two dozen giant black suit bags and start yelling at all the seniors to line up by the locker rooms.

Victor hovers at the back of the short men’s line, because he still feels anxious about it. It’s a stupid thing to feel anxious about, he thinks – no one will even be touching him this time, but he can’t stop the crawling feeling. It’s a pain to wait while everyone before him comes out and models their costumes for the rest of them to laughter and whistles and applause, but he does feel better when most of them are out on the rink, testing out the spandex.

The designer Victor had pushed over last time is there doing the men’s fittings and they make eye contact for a moment. Victor’s stomach freezes, but the man just smiles at him and leads him over to the only two bags that are still zipped up. “Short or free first?”

“Short,” Victor says. The designer nods and unzips the bag on the right and pulls out a pair of tight black pants with some dark, dark blue swirling feather designs down the sides. Victor can only see them in certain light as he turns them from side to side.

He lets the designer fit the costume for him, and on his body, it looks elegant. It looks masculine enough that it blends in with the other skaters. Victor remembers Evgeni wearing something similar last season, but with more glitter and no blue. It stretches well and it’s actually comfortable, which is a nice change of pace. He’s grateful that he never has to wear a tulle skirt again.

“I like the colors,” Victor says, staring at his back in the mirror.

The designer beams. “The free skate is a little lighter, I think you’ll like that one too.”

“Show me.”

The designer nods and unzips the other bag and pulls the costume out in three pieces. The first is the pants, which are pretty standard, just black and well tailored. The second is what appears to be a black half shirt, like someone had accidentally cut a sleeve off and decided not to tell anyone. Victor takes it and looks it over, confused; it has the same pointed panel and finger loop, but no detail beyond that.

The third bit, though. The third bit is what Victor threw out of his window, but somehow magical. Victor drops the shirt and the pants on a bench and reaches out to take it, running his thumbs over the dark blue feathered designs. The notch up the front is much higher than he’d initially drawn, baring the front of the pants, making it look less like a dress and more like a robe, like he’d hoped. One side looks like a short sleeve, with feathers stopping somewhere around Victor’s bicep; the other side is a cross-hatch of thick straps like he’d drawn with Katarina in his notebook. That has that pale skin-colored mesh underneath it, so Victor won’t have to show off his entire arm, and he’s kind of glad about that. “It’s beautiful.”

“Do you like it?” the designer asks eagerly. “We worked hard on that one, we tried to make it not so…” He trails off and makes a vague up-and-down gesture with his hand. “Try it on. I’m excited to see how it looks.”

Victor nods and strips off the short program top, then tugs on the half shirt. It looks odd, and it doesn’t hide as much of his body as he wants it to, but then he pulls on the feathered top part and no one could possibly see any feature of him under the bright, busy wings that are falling off of him. The designer turns back and helps him pull the finger loops on, and then Victor goes back to the mirror and turns around. The feathered top doesn’t have a skirt so much as it has coattails, and they flare out a little when he spins but not like a dress would. Maybe enough to show off his ass, if he wants to make the Godfather a flirty thing instead of a dramatic thing. He imagines Yakov’s reaction and snorts.

“Yes?” the designer says hopefully.

“Yes,” Victor says, firmly. “It’s perfect. I love it.”

The designer claps his hands and looks incredibly excited. He makes Victor stand in that costume so he can take pictures of it with a very large DSLR camera with a very large lens, and then Victor puts his skates back on and heads out to the rink. There are gasps and oohs and aahs and Victor does a neat spin and a flourish for them and sweeps his hair back. He doesn’t know if it was intentional, but the pale edging of the feather designs matches his hair nearly perfectly, and the whole thing makes him look like he’s glowing on the ice.

“Is this for your short program?” Katarina asks, running her finger down the criss-cross of straps on Victor’s arm.

“No. This is for my free. I’m skating to Godfather in this,” Victor says, and grins.

~

In between bronze Grand Prix series medals, Victor gets a letter from the FFKK.

Yakov gives it to him after they get back from the NHK trophy, where Victor came in third and narrowly but officially earned his spot at the Grand Prix Final in a couple of weeks. Victor is tired of getting official letters from official figure skating organizations, which usually inform him of things he is no longer allowed to do, but then he sees the Olympic seal in the top corner and his heart seizes in his chest.

“Second spot,” Yakov says. He sounds proud.

“Behind who?” Victor asks.

“Klimkin, from Moskvich.”

Victor frowns. “He’s alright.”

“Indeed, and he’s from Moscow, so you need to show him what for, okay, Vitya?”

Victor’s frown fades, and then twists into a grin. He reads over the letter, which tells him as much as Yakov had - second spot for Russian men’s singles figure skating, behind Ilia Klimkin - as well as some information about the events he’ll be in - short program on February fourteenth, free skate on February sixteenth - and the place he’ll be staying with the rest of the Russian team, in one of two cheerful looking buildings in the Bardonecchia Olympic village that Russia has laid claim to, most likely on a floor with all of Russia’s fifteen other figure skaters. He’s one of over a hundred and fifty athletes Russia is sending, Yakov explains, so they need two apartment buildings to fit everyone. America is taking up three and sharing the third with a few of the tinier contingents. Victor is fortunate in that he doesn’t have to share a room - the pair skaters, the ice dancers, and most of the hockey team have to pair off in rooms. The letter doesn’t say anything about any other singles skaters, though, so Victor isn’t sure if it’s because he doesn’t have a skating partner or if it’s because of who he is.

But that worry melts away, for the most part, because he has to get on a plane to Turin and become an Olympic athlete. He look at Yakov again, and Yakov gives him a small but very proud smile. “Congratulations, Vitya.”

“Wow,” Victor says, because he doesn’t really know what else to say. He had quietly hoped, to himself and not out loud, but it hadn’t really seemed like a thing that would happen. Like maybe Evgeni would drop his crutches and leap over the barrier wall onto the ice and steal another medal like he did four years ago. But Evgeni is at home doing physical therapy and the FFKK has to order a plane ticket for Victor.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Yakov warns. “You have the Grand Prix final in two weeks and you know almost everyone you skate against will be going to Italy with you.”

“I’ll just have to beat them all twice then,” Victor says. He’s usually not so bold anymore - in Juniors, he could say he would win and then follow it up, but Seniors had a rocky start and everyone is so much _taller_ than him - but he feels full of adrenaline and helium. His body feels lighter and he feels like he could medal. The Olympics aren’t really so different from Worlds; Yakov is right, he’ll see the same people he keeps seeing. He’ll know Klimkin from Nationals and at least four of the skaters from the Grand Prix finals and more from the Trophée and the NHK Trophy. It will be just like any other competition. Except that it’s not, and Victor feels half-honored and half ecstatic and he’s having trouble keeping them both inside of him at once.

“Well, you won’t beat them with that sloppy toe loop you’ve been doing lately,” Yakov says, shifting back from proud to strict in the blink of an eye. “You can’t afford to miss that in any competition you have coming up. So clean it up.”  
“Yes, Coach Yakov,” Victor says. He hands the letter back and rolls his eyes a little once Yakov’s back is turned, but Yakov knows anyway and Victor doesn’t care. He feels like he’s skating on clouds.

~

Victor takes bronze in the Grand Prix final. He’s not _incredibly_ proud of it, but he does well, and he beats out all of Japan and half of Canada to be third best in the world. First place, Stéphane Lambiel, who Victor watched get twin silver medals in the Grand Prix Series on television at Yubileyny, slings his arm around Victor and insists on shaking his hand in front of the cameras.

“You were excellent,” Stéphane tells him after the podium, even though he scored nearly twenty points higher than Victor. “Your form is very good.”

“Thank you,” Victor says. He feels a very tiny little bit starstruck, which is not a feeling he has often anymore. His shoulder tingles a little as Stéphane poses with Mr. Second Place From Canada for pictures, and then he pulls Victor back so all three of them can be stared at. Victor sees both the Japanese skaters heading off toward the locker room, not looking at all the reporters, aching over losing on home turf. Everyone is talking at once, holding little microphones out, and they’re not asking him anything yet but they will be soon.

“Shower time! Press conference is soon!” Stéphane announces loudly, and then he bodily drags Mr. Canada and Victor by the arms, through the crowd of reporters and to the locker rooms where it’s quieter. He lets them go when it’s safe, and then starts stripping out of his costume.

“Thank you,” Victor says again. He sits down on one of the benches and toes his shoes off.

“You looked a little overwhelmed,” Stéphane says. “This is your first Grand Prix, right?”

“First Senior Grand Prix.”

“Right, you did well in Juniors, I think?” Stéphane’s quite frankly horrible tiger striped shirt-vest combination thing is rolled down around his waist now, leaving him bare chested. “We weren’t in the same events.”

“I was younger. And I was in the girl’s Juniors,” Victor says quietly.

Stéphane’s eyes do what everyone else’s eyes do and give Victor a subtle, surprised, and very quick look up and down, and then he snaps his fingers and smiles. “Yes, that’s right, I remember. Well, bronze is very good for a Senior Grand Prix final debut! I heard you’re coming to the Olympics too.”

“Yes, I am, I just got the letter a couple of weeks ago.”

“It’s such a shame about Evgeni, he’s brilliant, but then again, so are you,” Stéphane says brightly.

“You think so?”

“Of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t have this.” Stéphane reaches out and taps Victor’s bronze medal, which is still around his neck, then wiggles out of the pants part of his costume. He turns to Mr. Canada, who’s now naked and rubbing one of his shins rather unhappily. “Okay, Jeffrey?”

Victor leaves them to it, still feeling a little buzzy. He carefully pulls his medal up over his head and folds the ribbon up, then places it in his bag like it might break. A shower starts up somewhere, and Victor really wants to take one too, so he grabs his bag and takes it with him into another one of the shower cubicles. He strips out of his costume and leaves it crumpled and sweaty on top of the little bench, which really won’t do him any favors later, and then showers as fast as he can, not even bothering to try to wash his hair. He only has one towel in his bag and it’s not very big, but he makes due, and he feels more comfortable slipping into his track suit and national team jacket and stuffing his hair under a beanie so it doesn’t make the back of his neck wet.

Mr. Jeffrey Canada is gone when Victor gets out, but Stéphane and Nobunari Oda are both getting dressed, looking damp. They look up when Victor drops his bag to pull his shoes on. Oda just gives Victor a nod, but Stéphane claps him on the shoulder. Victor forces his eyes not to do the same thing that Stéphane’s had done, because he’s not curious about why Stéphane was in any division, just about the skin that Stéphane hasn’t bothered to cover yet.

“I’ll see you at the conference,” he says easily, giving Victor a kind smile. “Get some rest, though, you look very tired.”

“I am. I will. See you,” Victor says, and then shoulders his bag and slips out.

He meets with Yakov and Yakov lectures him about under-rotating his quad Salchow, then makes Victor comb his hair because he can’t wear a hat to a press conference. Victor rolls his eyes and does as he’s told, steadfastly ignoring Yakov as he talks about camel spin form. The other Japanese skater passes by them and pauses to shake Victor’s hand and congratulate him, and then he disappears with his coach, presumably to go sleep for fourteen hours, which is what Victor would really like to do.

But he goes to the press conference, and he’s asked the same questions as usual - what it’s like to be a men’s Senior skater - he grinds his back teeth at _men’s_ \- and how it feels to win a medal and his inspirations for his programs. He talks about his choreographer and training under Yakov and the upcoming Olympics and his hopeful place at Worlds, if he can do well at Nationals. And then the attention shifts away from him to Mr. Jeffrey Canada, and Victor can lean back in his chair and pull that harmlessly content look out of his back pocket where he’d been holding onto it since the last time he won a medal at the Junior Grand Prix finals and put it on so he looks good for pictures.

After the conference, Yakov goes back to the rink for public practice for the pair skate, and Victor sleeps for fourteen hours.

The banquet the next night is very similar to the one at the Junior Grand Prix final, except everyone is tall and Victor is _there_ and, instead of sharing a glass of champagne with another teenage girl, he’s given a glass of champagne by new world number one men’s skater Stéphane Lambiel, who knows that Victor is seventeen and so winks and holds a finger to his lips and then slips off to talk to sponsors.

Victor drinks that, and another glass which is cheerfully supplied to him by the Tatiana half of one of the Russian pair skating teams, who won a gold medal earlier in the day. She lets him hang off her when the alcohol hits and he gets a little buzzed and clingy, and she dances with him and lets him lead, even though she’s a couple of inches taller than him in her heels.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she asks him as he twirls her around.

“Sure.”

“I’m retiring this season with Maxim,” she says. “And so is Ksenya.”

“Really?”

“Yep. We’re all dropping like flies at the Club, aren’t we?”

Victor frowns. “I hope not. Why are you retiring?”

“It’s been a rough road. I’m still recovering from surgery.” She touches her abdomen, and then the side of her head. “Maxim is still having trouble with lifts, in his head. And we’ve done well together.”

“And Ksenya?”

“Needs a break,” Tatiana says. “She never did so well as your first Nationals.”

Victor frowns.

“What about you, Vitya?” She spins him this time, though he’s a little awkward about getting under her arm. “Andrei left to train in America. Zhenya is still on crutches. What will you do?”

“I’m staying,” Victor says. “I love Saint Petersburg.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why I would ever want to leave.”

“Yakov could drive you away.” She sounds a little wry as she says it, but there’s a note of truth. Yakov is not the coach for everyone, and more than a few skaters have fled to other trainers over the years.

“Yakov doesn’t scare me.” In some ways, that’s a lie. But Yakov has never done anything except drive Victor forward, even when Victor _was_ scared, and something in Victor knows that he owes Yakov a debt larger than just his coaching fees. “I hope you don’t quit skating altogether.”

“Oh, I’m sure we won’t. There’s always touring. But I miss it when skating was fun, you know?”

Maxim appears, two champagne flutes in hand. He smiles at the two of them and comes over to rest his chin on Tatiana’s head. “Hi, Tanechka. Hi, Vitya.”

“Maxim,” Victor says.

“Congratulations on bronze.”

“Congratulations on gold.”

Maxim smiles again, and he probably doesn’t even know that it’s a little tense. “Thank you. Tanechka, we should make some appearances.”

“Ugh. Yeah, alright.” She steps away from Victor and takes the glass Maxim offers her, then gives Victor a little wave. “Don’t go crazy tonight.”

Victor waves back as they walk away. He’s approached by some sponsors, and looks charming for them. He probably plants the seeds for some new deals, if he can do well at Europeans.

He has a pretty good time. He poses for pictures and eats a lot of very good food that Yakov would never normally let him eat. He has a pleasant but slightly stuttery conversation with Mr. Jeffrey Canada, who’s a little iffy on Victor’s very heavily accented English but is otherwise a perfectly nice person. He finds fourth, fifth, and sixth place individually to shake their hands, and for the first time has to deal with the very subtle, very repressed resentment in the eyes of full grown men. Their gazes look him up and down and then they smile and thank him and congratulate him while wondering in the backs of their minds how they managed to lose to _this_.

Yakov catches him with more champagne and marches him off to bed with only a mild yelling fit. Victor rolls his eyes, and then sleeps for fourteen more hours, and flies home to Saint Petersburg to find he’s swapped positions with Ilia Klimkin to be Russia’s number one at the Olympics.

~

“So, where do you want this?”

Victor stares at himself in the mirror, then turns around and looks over his shoulder to see his back. He keeps his shirt pressed tightly against his chest, but raises one arm, then the other, to see how his skin stretches.

“On my shoulder, I think. Or the shoulder blade.”

“Here?” Gloves fingers touch the ridge of bone of Victor’s left shoulder.

“No, down a little.”

“Here?” Now the flat expanse of his shoulder blade.

“Yeah, I think that’s better.”

“Okay, let’s put the stencil on so you can check out placement.”

Lotion is applied to Victor’s shoulder, and then a small slip of paper is stuck to it. Fingertips dig in, making sure the pen transfers, and then slowly peel the paper away. “There. How’s that?”

Victor turns again, looking at it from a different angle. The rings look thinner than they will when it’s permanent, but the position is good. “I like it.”

“Great, great. Okay, let me get new plastic and we can get started.”

The tattoo artist turns the chair around and reaches under the headrest, then pulls a sheet of heavy plastic over the backrest. He sticks it to the bottom and smoothes it out, then gestures to the seat. “You can sit there, turned to the side. Facing that way, please.”

Victor climbs into the seat and lets his legs hang over the plastic arm. He holds his shirt tighter to himself, and he feels very exposed, but he doesn’t want to risk just pulling the shirt’s neck down and having it slip.

“Thicker lines than the stencil, right?”

“Sure, we can do that. I’ll start out a little thicker and then we can add more if you want it.”

“Sounds good.” Victor closes his eyes and leans his head against the chair’s headrest as the tattoo artist washes his hands again and gets new gloves, then pulls a little table over and sits down on a stool behind him.

“Let me know if you need to tap out for a break, okay?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I know, man. Ready?”

“Ready.”

A hum starts up, and a moment later, there’s a tingly sort of stinging on his shoulder.

Victor sits very still for the whole thing. He bites his lip a couple of times, but the pain isn’t really anything worse than what he deals with every day. It kind of itches, which is annoying, but the cool, wet, paper towels the tattoo artist uses to clean off extra ink help soothe it a little.

“So you won the European Championships,” the artist comments.

“Barely. But yes. It was my first time winning.”

“Hey, congratulations, man. That’s a hell of an accomplishment. European Champion and then the Olympics!”

“I’ve never been to the Olympics, I think it will be fun,” Victor says.

“I heard it is. I’ve given this kind of tattoo to some of you before, perks of being a couple blocks from the Club. Everyone seems to enjoy it.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, man. They got crazy stories about the Olympic villages. Shit goes on there, you know?”

“I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

“You’d better. I heard they have to mass-order, like, eighty thousand condoms.” Victor makes a face. “Hang on, I’m switching colors again. Just finished the green ring.”

“How many left?”

“Only the red one.”

“Alright.”

The tattoo artist switches needles again and changes green-smudged gloves, and then the buzzing starts up again. Victor’s shoulder is starting to get a little sore, but it’s manageable. The artist doesn’t try to talk to him anymore, and after another couple minutes, the buzzing stops and he sets down the needle.

“There we are. Go take a look.”

Victor slides out of the chair and twists his back from side to side, which makes his skin hurt, and then turns his back to the mirror again and looks over his shoulder. The rings are solid, thicker than the stencil as promised, and brightly colored. The green one is bleeding a little bit, but it’ll stop soon.

“I love it,” Victor says.

“Want it to be thicker?”

“No, it’s perfect like this.”

“Alright, great. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Victor leans against the chair as the artist cleans up the ink smears and pinpricks of blood, and then pats the tattoo dry and tapes some plastic over it to protect it until he gets home. He gets the proper care and maintenance pages and a little tube of Aquaphor, pays for the hour, and then goes into the private back area to change. He realizes halfway through putting his binder on that he can’t do that anymore, for at least a week or so, and sits on the ground for a moment dealing with that before he just puts his shirt on and then zips his jacket all the way up.

“There he is,” the artist says, grinning broadly when he comes back, binder rolled up and shoved into his jacket pocket. “Hey, see you in four years, man, alright? Get gold and make it back.”

“That’s the plan,” Victor says. He smiles too, though not quite as big, and shakes the artist’s hand, then hunches forward a little and slips out of the tattoo studio.

He examines the tattoo again in his bathroom mirror an hour later, once he’s home and the plastic cover has been taken off. The swelling is down a little, and it makes the colors stand out more. Victor touches the edge of it and smiles to himself. Only two more weeks until he flies out to Italy.

~

The Olympic village is wild. There are so many things happening every single moment of the day. A lot of other European countries are in the same village as the Russian team, so Victor sees people he saw less than a month ago at the European Championships. Some of them are a little bitter that he grabbed gold by the skin of his teeth, winning by less than a fourth of a point and then throwing roses into the crowd for a little blond Swiss boy like he deserved to have a bouquet at all. Others are just harmlessly curious, but Victor gets tired of explaining that yes, he was in the girl’s Junior division, and yes, now he’s in the men’s Senior division, and yes, the ISU let him do that, and no, it’s not a problem for him.

He also gets tired of what sound like orgies that echo around the stairs when he goes back up to his room after practice. There are, as his tattoo artist promised, little buckets of condoms absolutely everywhere. They have the Olympic logo on them, so Victor takes a couple because he thinks they’re hilarious.

He walks in on so many people having sex and so many people having sobbing breakdowns that the shock wears off two days in. Some people, when they see another athlete crying, sit down next to them or get them water or find some tissues. Victor is bad at all of that and quietly leaves them to it, because he knows that’s what he would want if someone caught him crying on the biggest stage of sports in the world.

He thinks that the Olympics will be like any other ISU competition until he gets out for the six minute warm up and there are so many thousands of people there. He sees every type of flag and every type of person, all talking and screaming and taking pictures all at once. He gets a little overwhelmed, staring around at everything, seeing stuffed toys and roses and posters, some of which even have _his_ name on them. It’s so much that he can’t even process it.

A hand on his shoulder startles him. He looks up and sees Stéphane, who smiles gently down at him. “Are you alright?”

“Yes, sorry. It’s just… a lot.”

“I know. I was pretty overwhelmed my first time too. But you’ll be okay.” Stéphane claps his shoulder again, then skates away because there’s only five minutes left of warmups and Victor should really get a final run on his jumps, so he trails after and earns some cheers with his triple axel.

Sometimes, Victor fades out during competitions, letting muscle memory do all the work, but now, his mind is so painfully present. He has never felt more present in his body than when the skater before him is in the kiss and cry getting his score and he steps out onto the ice in front of, realistically, millions of people. The Grand Prix and Worlds, those were big, but this is massive. Sound is directed down, straight on top of him, the weight of the gaze of every single person in the stands and every single television provider that is providing a close up on his face as they announce his name and he holds out his arms and skates into the middle of the ice.

He remembers every single bit of his short program, from the first note to the final pose, because it’s the best short program he’s ever skated in his entire life. He is violently present in his body, and landings are more jarring but his jumps are cleaner and his step sequences flow better. He has full control over every tiny detail; he is a puppet master of the ice, carving it open with perfect tiny divots for the edges of his blades to slot into. He forces out two quads instead of just one, a triple axel in a three part combination, a Bielmann spin with his body nearly bent in half because he can still make his joints do that. The noise on the rink is deafening, but Victor doesn’t need to hear the music. He knows this routine intimately inside himself, and it pours out of him like a flood until he finishes, one arm thrust in the air and feet in ballet position number five, and the stadium explodes with cheering.

Everything after that is a blur. Yakov hugs him as he gets off the ice and he rockets up to first in the standings. He sits with other skaters who have finished and he’s numb as he tries to gather all the feelings he left out on the ice and put them back inside himself. The next best skater, someone pretty from America who Victor hasn’t met, comes in five solid points behind him, and kisses Victor exaggeratedly on the hand when they gather for pictures and press afterwards. Victor blushes a little, and the American winks.

The next day, everything hurts very badly, and Victor spends half of the time sleeping and the other half icing his shins and his feet. He eats with other Russian athletes and watches the Olympics on his room’s television set. Someone in the room above him is having sex, which he tolerates until he can’t sleep and throws the room’s trash bin at the ceiling to get them to stop, which they do not.

The free skate is no less huge and no less overwhelming. The stands seem like they’re even more packed than before. All the skaters have quieted down - some were more jovial and talkative before the free skate, but now this is real. This is it.

Victor has to go last and he’s pretty sure he’s going to throw up. He hasn’t had nerves this bad in so long, possibly since his Senior debut, but he has to sit and watch twenty-three other people skate before him. Victor isn’t one for anxiety, but several skaters get over a hundred and fifty points, and two beat his all time personal best, and he locks up a little.

“Vitya,” Yakov says. “Time to go.”

Victor’s fingers shake a little as he unzips his jacket and gives it to Yakov. He waits at the gate as Pretty Second Place American finishes up his free skate and doesn’t pose a threat. He slips off his guards and gives those to Yakov too and tests the ice as the scores are read out.

“Vitya. Breathe.”

Victor breathes.

“You can do this.”

Victor can do this.

“Skate well.”

Victor nods. He reaches back and tugs his ponytail tighter, and once the scores are done, he lets all the air out of his lungs and skates out again.

He destroys his free skate. He feels like he barely breathes the whole time and his whole body is one big, overstimulated nerve, but he flies across the ice. Everything is perfect, down to the inch, snagging +2.1 and +3 G.O.E.s on nearly everything he does. Everything is silent in his ears, except for his own slamming heartbeat. He catches sight of himself on the big stadium screens one time by accident and he hardly recognizes himself, but it feels so natural, it was like his body was crafted for this program and all he has to do is unleash it.

When he forces himself to stop, when the music ends and the screaming and whistling starts and everything crashes back into him, his lungs trip and betray him and he cries. He falls on his knees and he cries out all of the energy that had forced its way into him for four and a half minutes. He skates half-blind to Yakov, still sobbing, and Yakov stands in front of cameras while Victor tries to pull himself together. He’s never skated that well in his life and he’s shaking so badly it hurts and it feels so, so good that he wants to press on the wound and never stop hurting.

He crushes his personal best, and everyone else’s scores. He gets over a hundred and fifty points too, and lots of those are from presentation elements, but it doesn’t matter. Victor landed four total quads in a competition for the first time ever and he’s again almost five points higher than the second best free skate, which means that no one caught him. No one really even got close. Numbers ring in his ears and Yakov’s arms are around him, lifting him up, saying– something. God knows what it is, but Victor doesn’t, because he’s an Olympic gold medalist and he’s sobbing again.

Yakov can’t protect him from cameras now, but second and third place do. Victor scrubs at his face with tissues from Pretty Now-Fifth-Place American’s box while Stéphane, who came second, and Mr. Jeffrey Canada, who came in third, team up to block him from view and talk loudly and animatedly about their programs. Another American skater, who is not as pretty as Pretty Fifth Place American but just as nice and slightly higher placed, makes him drink some water.

Then Victor has to talk to the camera and he makes it about a jumbled English-and-Russian sentence and a half in before he starts crying again.

He pulls it together for the medal ceremony and holds his head up high as the Russian national anthem plays. He holds his flowers tightly and breathes to feel the medal against his chest. It’s heavier than he expected, and it feels so good.

His second shot speaking to the media goes much better. He’s collected, he doesn’t cry, he speaks only in English. He’s charming and shows off the medal upon request, then kisses it on live television.

Yakov gets him back to his room in the village after one in the morning. Victor is absolutely exhausted, sweaty and smelly and shaky and in pain. Yakov helps him get inside and he directs Victor around toeing his shoes off and starting a shower and hanging up his jacket and taking ibuprofen. He makes Victor promise to shower and go to bed. Victor gets as far as the shower part, falls asleep sitting up, wakes up when the water gets cold, then drags himself to bed with a towel around his hair and passes out.

He misses most of the next day, waking up in the late afternoon and finding out it’s after five. The sun is going down outside and Victor is absolutely starving. He takes a second shower, very quickly, because the first was pretty useless, and then he heads downstairs to the massive kitchen that all of the village apartments have.

He’s mobbed nearly immediately by Russians, all shouting things at him and patting him on the back. Victor blinks at all of them, not really processing, until he remembers that he’s an Olympic champion now and his face breaks into a grin. He accepts hugs and pats on the back and on the head and high fives and handshakes, and then finally sits down with some pasta and chicken someone had already made and devours it in minutes. He gets stopped a few times to take pictures with other members of team Russia, but he doesn’t mind it. It’s fun.

Once he has food in his system, he goes back upstairs, gets dressed in normal human clothes and his national team jacket, and goes out. The Olympic villages are big by necessity, but there are people lounging around all over the place. He closes his eyes and breathes in the air, which is cool and crisp, but not too cool and crisp, and hears someone call, “Victor!”  
He looks around and sees someone waving to him from the grass. His blinks a few times and sees three red Switzerland jackets first, and then he focuses and sees Stéphane, smiling at him. Stéphane waves him over, and Victor walks toward the group hesitantly and sits down.

“Everyone, this is Victor,” Stéphane says, like they’ve been friends for years. “He just won gold in men’s singles. Victor, this is Swiss skating.” He points from one person to the other. “Sarah. Jamal.”

They both give Victor the quick, subtle look up and down, and then they smile and hold out their hands and congratulate him. Victor shakes and high fives and smiles back.

“Too bad about your free skate, Stéphane,” the woman teases. “If you weren’t fourth, you might have won.”

“He did well,” Victor says, mildly defensive on Stéphane’s behalf, even though he was too busy panicking to remember anything about Stéphane’s free skate.

“That’s kind of you,” Stéphane says. “We’re going out into the city for drinks, do you want to come? A few of the bars are pretty much athlete-only, so no one will bother you.”

Victor bites his tongue as he thinks. There are three people watching him, waiting for his answer, and he’s only ever met one of them, but Stéphane has only been kind to him since he came up to Seniors, and if he goes missing, there will be an international inquiry immediately, so he says, “Okay, sure.”

“Great, great!”

“Are you…?” the other man asks.

Victor raises his eyebrows.

“The drinking age in Italy is eighteen,” Stéphane says. “He’s fine.”

They all get up and head out of the village, past security guards, showing off their IDs and checking out of the campus. The streets outside are busier, with more tourists and locals walking around too, getting food and going shopping. Victor pulls up his hood over his hair. Not that it helps much, but he’s more distinguishable by his ponytail than by his jacket.

The bar they go to is all Olympic athletes, and Victor can tell. Everyone is incredibly fit, and most people are wearing athletic training shirts or national jackets. Some hockey players are playing foosball on a table in a corner while someone yells about incorrect rules in broken English. There’s music playing and people dancing off to the side, but it’s not so loud that all of Victor’s senses get drowned out.

Stéphane gets a local beer. The woman - Sarah - gets a martini. The other man - Jamal - gets straight vermouth. They look at Victor and Victor decides to be Russian and orders a double shot of vodka.

He does the shot and punches the bar and Stéphane pats him on the back. It doesn’t taste good, but it feels warm going down and soon, he feels comfortably loose.

The Swiss skaters are all talking in French, and Victor only picks up some of it. They tease the man a little for not advancing to the free skate, and then they talk about the women’s skating, which starts in six days. Victor catches something about a double axel, but his French still isn’t very good.

They hang out for a while, and then the man has to take a phone call and the woman goes over to the small dancing area with a dozen other people and Victor is left alone with Stéphane, which is the most ideal situation of the options he’s been given.

“How are you doing?” Stéphane asks.

“Good. I’m doing well,” Victor says.

“Not too overwhelmed?”

“Maybe a little. I haven’t been out yet, besides this. I slept for about sixteen hours, I just woke up around five. I haven’t talked to anyone back home yet.”

Stéphane laughs. “That’s a long time. I hope it helped.”

“I think so. What about you?”

“Oh, well, you know. Silver is a bitter pill to swallow sometimes, but I feel good. My knees are killing me, but they always do.”

“I know that feeling,” Victor agrees. He clinks his empty shot glass against Stéphane’s pint.

They talk for a bit about injuries – Stéphane has had multiple knee surgeries, Victor had a broken rib, both of them are looking forward to keeping their skates off for the rest of the games. Talking to Stéphane is a little strange, because Victor just beat him and he knows that Stéphane wanted the gold too, but he isn’t going to apologize for being the reason Stéphane’s eyes are a little tighter around the corners. Stéphane is gracious about it, though, and he compliments Victor’s skating again, and he seems genuinely nice enough that Victor feels comfortable around him.

Stéphane gestures toward the foosball table with his pint glass, which has been refilled. “An ice hockey player keeps looking at you.”

Victor glances over too. He doesn’t recognize any of them, or even what language they’re speaking when it drifts over to him. He waits for a bit, and sure enough, one of the players, a particularly young looking one, glances up, sees Victor looking, and glances away with a tiny blush on his face.

“Well then,” Stéphane says. “That’s not very obvious at all, is it?”

Victor shakes his head a little, but he’s relaxed and warm and he’s an Olympic champion on top of the world and high off of gold, so the next time the hockey player looks over, Victor holds his gaze with level eyes and a bit of a smirk.

It takes a little while, but Victor pushes the hockey player back against the wall of the men’s bathroom and claims his mouth, which tastes like sweet alcohol, and becomes the very person he was annoyed about two days ago.

“I’m heading back to the village,” he announces to Stéphane, half an hour and a considerable amount of grinding later. The hockey player is back at the foosball table getting his shoulders shoved by his teammates and blushing again.

Stéphane grins and offers him a fist bump on his way past.

 

Yakov has to stick around until ice dancing is over, so Victor stays too. He makes acquaintances with the top Russian women’s figure skater, who is from Moskvich but a perfectly pleasant person. He goes out to restaurants and clubs with other skaters - Pretty Fifth Place American is a particularly good dancer, and Victor dances with him and kisses him too. He sleeps and eats a lot and goes to the rink one time, because he misses skating, but his body still hurts and it doesn’t like it, so he backs off. He invites the hockey player, who turns out to be Czech and the baby of the team, back to his room for the night, and then watches the Czech team play and lose to Finland the next day. He watches the ice dancing, and then he goes for a walk on his own, runs into some more skaters, and ends up at a bar again, drunk and leaning his head on the shoulder of one of the Chinese skaters he beat and nodding off until someone makes him go to bed.

He’s almost glad that Yakov doesn’t have any women’s singles skaters at the competition, because he’s enjoying the village far too much. Yakov wants to fly out on the twenty-third, so Victor parties for all of the twenty-second, barely making it back in time to pack before he passes out. He has several hickeys and several phone numbers from people who he can just look up on the internet, and he looks smug when Yakov sees him roll up with his suitcase in the apartment lobby and goes so red it looks kind of purple.

He gets back to Saint Petersburg, sleeps, and comes back to Yubileyny to a hero’s welcome. Between all the figure skaters, they have five medals - four for pair skating, and then Victor. He gets hugs and claps and pounds on the back and he lets everyone pass around his medal before he puts it back in his bag. He doesn’t skate, just works out in the gym, because his shins are still splinting and even basic jumps hurt, and then goes home again. After the whirlwind of the Olympics, everything feels vaguely off-center, but good. Victor hangs his medal up on his wall with some push pins and he feels strong when he looks at it.

~

Worlds is a bit of a letdown compared to the Olympics, but Victor doesn’t really mind too badly. He rides that Turin high for a while, and then realizes how overstretched he is and how much pain his legs are in all the time. He keeps training anyway and he does well, placing fifth after the short program and clawing his way up to a bronze after the free, but it just matters a little less. Next year, he’ll take Worlds by storm and figure out how to get gold, but he’s just so tired and in so much pain right now that third place is tolerable.

Stéphane wins gold and they go out for drinks, which Victor can do in Canada now. A few other skaters come too, but the cognitive dissonance is big. A month ago, they were crazy, laughing and partying and buying each other shots, but now everyone is subdued and reasonably polite. It makes sense, but it feels uncomfortably stiff, and Victor heads back to his room early, feeling like he doesn’t know much of anyone anymore.

After Worlds is more difficult. Victor is still sitting on a bunch of niggly little injuries that he hasn’t let rest, so Yakov bans him from skating for a while. That keeps him home, because he can’t run until his shins stop splinting and he can’t skate on a twice twisted ankle and Yakov said no skating until May anyway, so there’s little else to do. He thinks of calling some of the other skaters from the rink, but everyone is on vacation for the end of the season. He thinks of calling some of the skaters from Turin, but he has even less idea of what to say, or if any of them still want to talk to him.  It’s very jarring, going back to being so alone after so many events. Victor doesn’t really know what to do about it.

~

He gets a dog.

His apartment is a no-pets building, but he’s Victor Nikiforov, so he goes out and gets a dog.

He spends a few weeks bouncing between all the pet shops and shelters that he can walk to in Saint Petersburg, looking for one that stands out. The shops have prized purebreds, groomed into ridiculous perfection. Victor doesn’t like looking at them because they remind him too much of everyone he knows. The ones in the shelters are happier to see him, and the shelter directors let him sit in the play room with a few dogs crawling all over him and he hugs them all and laughs.

He finds a big, brown standard poodle in a shelter across town. The poodle wags its big, fluffy tail when Victor holds his hand out between the bars of the kennel, and pants happily when Victor scratches it behind the ears.

“This one’s new,” the shelter director says brightly. “His family moved across the country and couldn’t take him with them. He’s a good boy, though, aren’t you, baby?”

The dog boofs softly and walks around in a tight little circle, then sits down again.

“Can I see this one?” Victor asks.

“Sure thing.” The director clips a leash to the poodle’s collar and opens the gate for him, and then she takes them both to the play room and unclips the leash again. Victor sits on the ground and the poodle walks straight into his lap and flops down. Victor laughs, startled but happy, and rubs the dog’s side.

“What’s his name?” Victor asks as the dog licks his face.

“His name when he got here was Alyosha, but he doesn’t seem to like it very much,” the director tells him.

“Hm. How old?”

“Just a year, maybe a little bit more. Already fixed, too. He’s a big boy.” The director reaches down and rubs the dog’s belly. The dog rolls over immediately, one paw in the air. Victor is helplessly in love.

“I haven’t seen many poodles around here.”

“The little ones don’t like the cold so much,” the director says. “And they’re such cuties, they get adopted right away, don’t they?”

Victor looks at the dog’s face as he pets his belly. The dog looks back and his tongue flops out of his mouth.

“I want this one,” he says firmly.

“Yeah, that’s not surprising. He’s so sweet. Everyone has already fallen in love with him.” The director stands up, grunting a little, and hands the coiled up leash to Victor. “We can put a hold on his adoption papers for up to a week,” she tells him. “Unless you want to do it right now.”

Victor very much wants to do it right now, but he knows that he shouldn’t. “Not today. Um… in two days. One day? No, two days. Can I come back in two days?”

“Of course. I’ll go pull his file now and get you an application, though your background check is going to be pretty easy. I’ll be back in a moment.”

The director leaves, and the dog rolls onto his side and looks at Victor again. Victor looks back, then lies down on the ground too. The dog licks his cheek and Victor smiles.

“You’re a good boy,” he murmurs, stroking the dog’s curly fur. “I’ll have to think of what to call you.”

The dog presses his wet nose against Victor’s chin. Victor smiles wider and curls his fingers into his fur.

He fills out the application form and goes home, then goes to a pet shop and buys a big, squishy dog bed and a big bag of dog food and half a dozen toys that he’s seen in the shelters. He gets a nice leash and a nice collar and one of those little bag holders that you can pull little plastic bags out of for walks. He buys several types of treats, including the ones pills go in, just in case the dog comes with medication he needs. He takes it all home in several trips on the bus, then stares around his apartment. He cleans with more intent than he has since he left the commons at the start of his Senior career, moving small and breakable things into boxes and putting away the few things that he cares about that he doesn’t want drooled on. He goes to his landlords in his Team Russia jacket and says, “I’m bringing a dog back in a couple days. I accept any raise in rent that might require,” with all the authority he has in his eighteen year old body, and the landlords don’t dare disagree with Russia’s hero so his rent goes up three thousand rubles a month and he doesn’t care. He sweeps and vacuums and puts little protective plastic things on his cupboards and cabinets so they’re hard to get into. He does double practice the next day, half on the ice and half in the gym, and fantasizes about walking along the water with a leash curled around his wrist.

Then the next day, he practices, goes home, showers, and goes back to the shelter. There are forms and fees waiting for him, but there’s a dog waiting for him too. The dog jumps up and puts his paws on Victor’s hip when Victor comes in, and Victor is instantly even more in love than before. He kneels down and rubs the dog’s sides, then gently hugs him to his chest.

“He’s all up to date on vaccinations,” the director says. “There are two very good vets in the area that we like to recommend, I’ll put their numbers on your forms.”

She scribbles information from the file onto the paperwork, then turns it around and pushes it toward Victor. Victor stands up and shuffles over to the counter and the dog is already following at his heels. He scans the paperwork - which is mostly legally binding promises that he’s not adopting a dog to neglect or abuse it. He signs his name under each clause, and then at the bottom, and he passes the papers back and pays the six thousand ruble adoption fee in cash. The director slots the papers into a file folder, then produces some papers about veterinary care and obedience training and general dog care. As promised, there are two phone numbers hand-written at the bottom, one with a star drawn next to it. Victor carefully folds the papers up and tucks them into his pocket for safekeeping.

“I think that should about do it,” the director says with a bright smile. “Feel free to come back any time if you have questions. See a vet in the next month.”

“I will,” Victor promises.

“Good, good.” The director comes back around the front desk and kneels down to rub the dog’s head, then clips the leash back to his collar and hands it to Victor. “Take care, you two.”

Victor beams at her, and then the dog, and then he turns and heads out the front door, dog in tow.

The dog walks at his side for a while, but then there’s grass and bugs and a bird and he gets excited. He runs forward and Victor trips a little as he’s pulled along after him. The dog jumps up to catch a fly, misses, and falls down, then looks back at Victor happily. Victor looks back down and just smiles for a moment, until the dog sees another bug and lunges for that instead.

The walk home is much the same, the dog getting excited about the world and Victor’s heart getting too big to fit in his chest and filling up his entire body. The dog poops behind a bush, but Victor doesn’t have anything to pick it up with, so he glances around to make sure no one is looking and then runs for it for a block. The dog bounds along next to him, mouth open and tongue out, and licks Victor’s hand when he stops and catches his breath.

When they get home, Victor opens all the doors and lets the dog wander around and sniff everything. While he does, Victor pours water into one bowl and puts it down by the counter, then hefts the big food bag down from a shelf and scoops half a cup into a second bowl and sets that on the ground on the other side of the kitchen. He rolls the top of the bag back up and puts it away, then turns around, expecting to see the dog, but he doesn’t. He waits for a moment, then wanders around until he sticks his head in the door of his bedroom and sees the dog curled up on his bed. Victor beams, then goes and lies down on the bed too, propping himself up against his pillows. The dog cracks an eye open, then gets up, comes over to Victor, and flops into his lap. Victor pets his soft head and the dog huffs quietly, then closes his eyes again.

“Who are you, then?” Victor wonders out loud. “What do I call you?”

The dog’s tail thumps lazily against the bed.

Victor spends a while trying out names, announcing them to the ceiling. He places his hand on the dog’s side and feels him breathing, then does the same to himself, slipping his fingers under his sports bra and counting heartbeats. He feels more settled than he has in a while.

“What about Makkachin?” he asks the dog. The name feels good in his mouth. He rolls the syllables around slowly, thinking about each one. It sounds kind of like a latte that some of the skaters like to drink, and it’s a little bit appropriate. “Makkachin.”

The dog’s tail thumps against the bed again.

“Yeah. I think that’s pretty good too.”

Makkachin yawns and lays his head on Victor’s chest. Victor wonders if that would be uncomfortable if anyone else did that, but Makkachin is a dog and doesn’t care what Victor’s body looks like. He smiles and presses his face into Makkachin’s fur, rubbing his cheek in slow circles, and then leans back and closes his eyes and drifts to the heavy, warm weight on top of him.

~

He goes out with his rink mates a little less now, but he feels better. The press gets wind of the new dog right away, and soon there are pictures of Victor and Makkachin in magazines all over the world. Makkachin has a bad habit of chewing on the laces of Victor’s skates, but Victor starts keeping his skates on the kitchen counter after the second time he’s had to replace the laces and Makkachin doesn’t care enough to try to get them. He’s perfectly content when Victor gets one of those thick knotted rope toys and plays tug of war while watching movies.

When Victor goes out to skate, he leaves the curtains open so that Makkachin can nap in the sun. When Victor goes out for runs, Makkachin runs too, chasing seagulls whenever possible. Victor is easily swayed by big, sad dog eyes and feeds Makkachin chicken scraps after dinner. He sleeps against a warm, fuzzy lump of a body every night, and he’s covered with a thin sprinkling dog fur almost every day. He brings Makkachin to the rink on his day off and all the other skaters come outside and coo and pet Makkachin, and Makkachin sits and bears it nobly and pants happily at all the belly rubs. Victor takes pictures of Makkachin and puts them on his official Myspace page. Makkachin licks his new computer.

He doesn’t remember the last time he loved another living thing this much. (He knows when it was, but he doesn’t _remember_.) Makkachin is at his apartment every day after practice to press his paws up against Victor’s hip and lick his hands, and Victor scoops him up with a grunt and carries him off to the bedroom for naps and feels happy.

~

He does very well in the Grand Prix series. It’s been nearly two years since he came out as  _men’s Senior division figure skater Victor Nikiforov_ , and no one is underestimating him anymore. No one mentions his crash at his first Europeans or complete averageness at his first Worlds or even his bronze sweep of all his Grand Prix events last year. Evgeni is back, but he’s shaky and out of practice and his skating is suffering and so is his ranking, so Victor is Russia’s star and Olympic champion and third best in the world, and he’s not breaking Senior records yet but he’s getting right up there and staring them in the face. He passes his own personal best again in Skate America and just barely catches gold there, and a fall - his first in a while - takes him down to bronze for the NHK Trophy. On the podiums, everyone is taller and leaner and more muscular than he is, but they’re starting to learn that that doesn’t matter so much. Victor might be shorter, might be wider, might have thicker hips and no dick and a chest that he can’t make completely flat and long, flowing silver hair out of a fairy tale, but he has beaten them once, and everyone knows that he’s going to do it again.

The Grand Prix Final is in Saint Petersburg this year. Victor has always liked being home for competitions, but this time, it’s even better, because he doesn’t have to check Makkachin into a kennel or convince someone at the Club to take care of him for a week while he’s halfway around the world. He does his short program and ranks third, and then goes home and showers and sleeps with a dog on top of him.

The next day is pair skating and ice dancing. Yakov likes them to go, but they aren’t required to, so Victor doesn’t. He does look at his free skate choreography and grainy videos that he’s taken of himself during practice on his handheld camera and his free skate costume. It’s all black, a tight shirt and tight pants, almost demure on one side and bright slashes of silver up the other, one shoulder bare and a tiny cape off the other. He’d let someone else design his costume this year because he choreographed both his programs on his own - the short program costume is more generic, but this one is almost violently eye catching. Victor kicks off his pajama pants and puts the costume on and pulls his hair out of the elastic he’s tied it back with. It cascades around his shoulders and down his back, and it doesn’t really match. The silver of the costume is bright in a way that fabric allows, and the silver of his hair washes it out a little. He shakes his hair in front of his face, then shoves it away, and then rolls it into a bun at the back of his head so he can’t see any of it.

He hates it. He has for a while. He’s kept it because it’s part of his look and it makes him stand out, but he hates it. Every news article that attaches a picture of his hair fanning out behind him when he does a spin crashes down on his shoulders. Every forum post that insists on putting pictures side by side of Victor as a sixteen year old girl and Victor as an eighteen year old man attaches itself to Victor’s insides like a leech drag themselves back up and out of his mouth so he has to look at them all again. He watches his free skate video again and hates it, and he looks himself up on the internet and hates it and he stares in his bathroom mirror and he hates it.

He feels so different than he did two years ago, but it looks like he hasn’t changed at all.

He can’t find scissors so he finds himself holding kitchen shears, standing at his sink, a lock of hair in hand. He hesitates once, for a second, but he needs this, more than he realized until just now. He needs to stop seeing the Junior World Champion when he looks at himself. He needs everyone else to stop seeing her.

He hacks long strands of hair away and fills up his sink. Makkachin wanders in and sits next to the shower and whines, but Victor ignore him. Fistfuls of hair fall away and some litter the ground and some end up straight in the trash. Victor cuts faster, uneven and uncareful, and finally drops the scissors in the sink and breathes heavily and stares at himself.

It’s not very good, but it can be fixed. The ends are choppy, squared in chunks. The back is shorter than the front. He has bangs now, even though his hairline diverts them all to the left. His head feels– lighter, in a surprising way. He wouldn’t think that hair would weigh that much, but without it, he doesn’t feel nearly as dragged down.

He carefully picks up all the hair and pushes it into his tiny bathroom trash can, then picks up the shears again.  He leans in close to the mirror and starts cleaning up edges. Wisps of hair fall away and make Makkachin sneeze and Victor wrinkle his nose. He brushes his hair out with his fingers, shaking tiny ends away, and then uses a hand mirror to get the back. There are a couple of mis-cuts, but he thinks he does a pretty good job.

He takes a shower and rinses all the hair off. When he goes to wash it, he gets too much shampoo and lets half of it slide off his hand and down the drain. He scrubs it clean and tries to pile it on top of his head like he usually can, but it’s too short now. Rinsing takes less time, and so does conditioner. He feels a little cheated out of the whole shower experience.

When he looks in the mirror, he surprises himself. He know he _just cut it all off_ , but for some reason, it’s still shocking that there isn’t more hair there. The lines are alright, though, and it looks pretty smooth, for kitchen shears. Victor runs his hand through his new bangs and pushes them off to the side so he can look himself in the eyes.

At least no one else will see it coming either.

He wears a hoodie to the rink the next day. He changes out of view of everyone else and everyone gives him privacy as always. Sometimes he feels a little shunned when he comes into the locker room and everyone else politely turns away, but he knows it’s out of respect and he’s not sure he could handle Nobunari Oda staring at his chest anyway.

He wears a knit hat until the very last second, even during warmup. Yakov is standing at the gate as Oda skates off to go to the kiss and cry and he holds out his hand for Victor’s guards. Victor hands them to him, and then sweeps his jacket and beanie off and hands them to Yakov too and gets on the ice to do a quick lap before Yakov can say anything.

He hears, “ _Vitya!_ ” shouted at his back as he stretches his legs. There’s an immediate murmur through the crowd and Victor smiles pleasantly up at them and waves. A few people scream at him and he winks, then does some back crossovers. Adrenaline is slamming through him. Yakov is probably still yelling. Oda gets a score of 147.71 and Victor _knows_ he can do better than that.

He skates back to Yakov, who is an impressive shade of red. “Vitya,” he hisses. “ _Victor_. What the hell are you doing?”

Victor adjusts his little shoulder cape. There are still a few clingy bits of hair that he hadn’t managed to brush off. He grins. “Surprising everyone.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, in third after the short program, representing Russia, Victor Nikiforov!”

The stands erupt, and Victor turns and waves again, smiling brightly. His heart is going to burst out of his chest, but until the organ is actually lying there on the ice, he’s going to pretend that it’s fine.

“You’d better back this up, Vitya,” Yakov says.

“I will,” Victor promises, and then he skates out into the center of the rink.

He screams his way through his free skate and his mind goes blank. Everything is the outside edge of his blade on the ice, the inside edge of his blade on the ice, his toe pick, the outside edge again. He hears nothing and sees white and feels balanced and lands all of his jumps, even his quad flip. Television cameras pick up loud cheers and signs with his name on them, but he never sees a thing off the ice until people are on their feet cheering and throwing rose bouquets and stuffed poodles at him. Victor raises his arms in the air and bows, then rubs his face with both hands, then bows again. The announcer is saying something over the loudspeaker, but there’s too much blood in his ears for him to hear it, so he just leans down as he skates off the rink and picks up one of the big stuffed poodles to have something to hold onto.

Yakov doesn’t look red anymore when he gets off the ice and snaps his guards on. He wraps an arm around Victor’s shoulders and half-guides, half-drags him to the kiss and cry. He sits Victor down and makes him drink water and lectures him about his step sequence - was it good? It was probably good - until they announce that Victor’s score is 153.71. It’s not the best he’s ever done, but it rockets him up into first and makes it look a little harder to catch him.

“Well done, Vitya,” Yakov says gruffly, clapping him hard on the shoulder. “It seems this stunt has paid off.”

Victor beams and runs a hand through his hair. He still feels lighter, and only his first Grand Prix Final gold medal keeps him from floating away.

~

At the end of the 2006-07 season, Victor goes behind Yakov’s back and meets with all of the Yubileyny Sports Club medics. They’ve been giving Victor physicals since he was fifteen years old - they’ve watched him grow up and become who he is, helping him through each pro and con of each part of transition, so when he approaches them, none of them are surprised. They have a long talk, and then the next week, they have another long talk, and Victor gets referred to EuroMed.

“So you want a prescription for testosterone,” the EuroMed doctor, a middle aged man called Ivanov, says.

“Yes,” Victor says. He’s sitting in a comfortable office chair, one leg crossed over the other, hands folded in his lap, and he gives Ivanov a pleasant smile.

“And you’ve been in the process of transition for…?”

“Two and a half years, publicly,” Victor says. “I’m sure you’ve seen the newspapers.”

Ivanov clears his throat a little and jots something down in his notebook. “Well. Yes. It’s all protocol, I’m sure you can imagine.”

“Of course, doctor,” Victor says politely. “But I know who I am and you know who I am and we both know that this isn’t a spur of the moment decision.” He leans forward, resting one elbow on Ivanov’s desk. “I’ve cleared it with the Sports Club medics, of course. They referred me here. If you need a letter, I can supply you with one.”

Ivanov nods. “Later. It will be good to have on record.” He turns in his chair to his computer and starts typing. Victor watches his fingers fly across the keyboard, but he can’t make anything out. “We do prescribe three kinds of testosterone here, once we connect you with a specialist to help you with your physical transition. Do you have any nut allergies?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then we can set you up with any of the three.”

“What would you recommend?”

“Well, that depends on what you want your injection schedule to look like.”

Victor’s stomach clenches a little, unpleasantly. “And if I can’t… inject?”

Ivanov blinks. “That’s certainly the best way to do hormone replacement therapy for men like you. You’ll see desired changes faster, and you’ll only have to do it once a week at most.”

“I’ve read about injections,” Victor says. He leans both his elbows on the desk. “You get mood swings, and irregular hormone levels from the time you take it to the day before your next dose. I can’t afford to have changes like that on a day to day basis, I can’t show up at practice raging and hurt myself in anger.” His heart is suddenly pounding in his chest, and his mouth tastes like iron, even though he’s not bleeding. “Don’t you have gel? Or patches? I know they make pills that aren’t very good but–”

“We only prescribe injectable testosterone here,” Ivanov interrupts lightly. “The rest are… uncommon in this area. Non-scrotal patches haven’t even been around for ten years. And your misgivings aren’t unfounded. Living as an athlete, you have to be very in tune with yourself all the time.”

“Exactly,” Victor says. “So you…”

Ivanov sighs and leans back in his fancy office chair. “I can’t help you here,” he says, and he does sound regretful about it. It doesn’t keep Victor’s heart from sinking, but it does slow its descent a little bit. “If you think on it and decide to go the injectable route, I’m more than happy to pair you up with a specialist, but if not…”

“If not,” Victor repeats softly.

“I’ve heard mixed things about the others. Patches and gels are the second and third most used delivery methods, especially in the Western hemisphere, but… they’re really just not as fast acting.”

“That’s okay,” Victor says. And it is. It feels okay. Just starting the process already makes him feel a little more comfortable in his skin. And the idea of changing anything about his body too quickly still makes him a little nervous. This gives him a little more time to think.

Ivanov looks at him over his glasses. “Patches are rather expensive, you know.”

“I have money.”

Ivanov sighs again. “The nearest clinic I know is in Gatchina. They’re smaller than we are, so I don’t know how different their answers will be, but you can check there.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Victor holds out his hand and Ivanov shakes it, and then Victor leaves the building and calls Yakov.

“Vitya,” Yakov grunts.

“Yakov, I’m taking the week off.”

“What? Why?”

“Travel.”

“Aren’t you bored of traveling?”

“Aren’t you bored of me?”

Yakov is quiet for a moment, then sighs. “When are you coming back?”

“Seven days from tomorrow. One week off.”

“Fine, fine, but you’ll be back at seven in the morning sharp on your first day back.”

He sounds the tiniest bit hesitant, but Victor attributes that to the fact that he’s almost never asked for any time off before, and he puts on his bright smile out of habit.

“Of course. See you, Yakov!” He hangs up his phone, then gets the train back into the city center and pulls out his credit card with all of his sponsorship money attached and rents a car.

 

The next day, Victor sleeps in, eats a good breakfast, checks Makkachin into a dog hotel, and drives to Gatchina. The clinic there is small, just as Ivanov had said, but not small enough that people in the waiting room don’t recognize him. They stare and then pretend not to stare as Victor presents his ID card and quietly fills in forms.

He has a similar conversation as yesterday with the woman who sees him. She doesn’t seem to know much at all about hormone therapy, and Victor cheerily grits his teeth as she makes phone calls down to the pharmacy center.

“We really only supply non-injectables to women,” she says apologetically. “Estrogen hormone therapy is much more accessible in pill form than testosterone.”

“So… you only have injectible testosterone?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well, thank you anyway.”

Victor spends the rest of the day seeing what sights there are, and then gets a hotel room and sits in the lobby and uses the public internet to look up clinics in Novgorod.

 

Victor wakes up and drives the three hours to Novgorod.

Novgorod is the same.

“I’ve heard of transgender men on patches in Moscow,” the endocrinologist Victor meets with says. “Here, we have trouble getting a supply of any hormones at all. Try Moscow, or Saint Petersburg.”

“I came from Saint Petersburg,” Victor says, sitting on his hands so he can better resist the urge to throw things.

“Ah, unfortunate. Moscow, then!”

“Moscow, then,” Victor says with less enthusiasm. Moscow is a long drive.

Novgorod has lots of buildings and museums and not much else, so Victor takes some pictures and then goes to the movies. He sleeps badly in his hotel room, frustration and anxiety chasing around each other. If he can’t get anything in Moscow, he’ll– he doesn’t know. Make some sort of three time a week injection bargain with a new doctor and hope that nothing changes too drastically.

 

“We prescribe Testoderm,” an actual real life hormone specialist in Moscow tells Victor two days later. “And Androgel. If you had to pick between the two, though, I would suggest Testoderm, the gel has to be applied twice a day and you run the risk of transferring it if you touch someone.”

“Wait. Okay. So you _can_ prescribe me testosterone patches,” Victor repeats, hardly daring to hope that he’d understood the brand names correctly.

“I, personally, can’t, until we get you paired off with someone specializing in transitional therapy,” the doctor says. “Which might be me! I’d certainly be willing to take you on as a patient. But someone can get you a prescription for testosterone patches.”

Victor’s heart is pounding again. He feels so close to the edge of something. “I live in Saint Petersburg.”

“And here you are,” the doctor says, smiling brightly at him.

Victor likes her.

“What would that entail?”

“Mmm, bloodwork, a physical, a long talk with a therapist who knows about transitioning. A lot of paperwork.” She smiles again. “How long are you here for?”

“Two more days.”

“I think we can get all that done in two days with an urgent rush job.” The doctor - she insists on being called Irina - holds out her hand and Victor shakes it. “Let me just put in a general lab test request and we can get those blood samples done about an hour from now.”

Four hours later, Victor has been bled, poked, prodded, examined, stared at, and scrutinized more than he feels remotely comfortable with off the ice. He puts the lapels of his overcoat up and wraps himself up tight. He has too many thoughts running through his head, most of them centered on _is this really, finally happening,_ and he doesn’t want to go back to a hotel room and live with them, so he walks. He finds himself in the west end of the Kremlin as the sun is starting to go down and goes to the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge. It’s always more beautiful the later it gets. Victor stands on the walking path by one end and watches the Moskva River move underneath him. He feels comfortably small in the wake of it. It makes him feel calm. He takes a picture of the city with his camera, then stuffs it back in his pocket and leans his head and back against a support and watches cars and people pass him. People notice him and Victor can see the recognition in their faces, but something about tonight keeps them moving on without trying to talk to him, and he kind of appreciates it.

By the time he walks back to his rental car, it’s quite dark and Victor is very hungry, so he stops in a drive through to get bad takeout food and eats it with his hands while watching TV in his hotel, vibrating a little at the idea of tomorrow.

 

The next day they take more blood, and Victor meets with a therapist. He feels a little apprehensive going in, until it becomes clear that the woman he’s talking to isn’t going to make him go through the year or two of therapy that people used to have to go through. He tells her about his goals for his transition - to go slow, to be leaner, to get stronger, to move the fat around his hips and thighs to make himself less curvy, the possibility of top surgery if he can convince Yakov to give him a month off in the post season. To maybe get a little taller, if he has one last growth spurt in him. To make people forget about the accomplishments of Victoriya Nikiforova, so that when they look at him, they only see Victor Nikiforov. To pass well enough that people stop referencing his Juniors career in news articles about him.

Victor knows that he’s the (only) poster child for transgender athletes in Russia so far, but sometimes it weighs heavily, seeing himself with a low cut leotard and a skirt plastered where anyone can see it.

The therapist frowns when he mentions only a month for surgical recovery, and shakes her head when he suggests that a nineteen year old might have one more growth spurt, but she nods along with everything else, looking understanding and sympathetic in turns. Victor hates to talk about things like this with strangers, who don’t always understand, but this woman understands, and she never shuts anything he says down.

“So if you’re sure about the patches,” she says, looking at Victor’s file on her computer, “we can get you a prescription for those… tomorrow afternoon, if we rush the blood work. We’ll mark your case as urgent, since you can’t stay here.”

“So… you’ll do it?”

“I won’t, the specialist your first met with will. She’ll go over side effects and expected timelines with you again once your labs come back. But yes, we can certainly do this for you.”

Victor’s body feels like it’s suddenly filled with helium and light. It urges him to lunge out of his chair and hug the therapist, but he stays seated, fingers digging into the arms of the chair he’s sitting in. His pulse is so loud in his ears that he can’t hear the clicking of the therapist’s keyboard anymore.

He gets a final blood draw and another physical exam after, and he isn’t even bothered by it. He gets a second clean bill of health in two days, and watches, shaking a little, as the physician sends that bill off to Irina. He sits in a chair with a little bag of cookies and a styrofoam cup of water after his blood draw, jiggling one leg, waiting until he can stand up again. He tries to calm himself down, but it doesn’t work. He’s been on edge since he got to Moscow and wasn’t turned away, and he can’t burn the hopeful energy out for long enough to sit still.

He goes running that night, in a t-shirt and his sleep pants because he didn’t bring any clothes to work out in. But he has too much nervous energy to stay in the hotel, and the bustle of the Kremlin, which had been calming last night, feels too overstimulating right now. Victor wants to dig his fingers into the Earth and forcibly rotate it around by hand until it’s tomorrow and he gets a call from someone at the hospital. Logically, he knows that his blood work will be fine, just like it always is when the Club medics look at it, but there’s a tiny, clawing fear that this won’t be it. That something will be wrong and everything will be ripped away and he’ll spend the drive back to Saint Petersburg hating his body for all new reasons. It’s carried his soul wrong and it’s held him back from jumping as far or as high or as many times around as he wants, but it’s never been cruel to him. Not like he is to it. He presses one hand against his ribs and the memory of an old hairline fracture manifests and turns into a cramp. Victor slows to a stop at a light pole, panting, rubbing his side, and looks out over the water again. Lights are starting to come on and paint the river, and Victor doesn’t want to be around when everything goes dark.

 

Victor’s phone yells and Victor starts and sits up in his hotel bed, scrubbing at his face. He looks around wildly for the clock and blanches when he sees that it’s after eleven. He’d gone to a bar after running and had a few drinks, and then been bought a few more drinks, and he feels fine now, but he has to scramble across the room to where drunk Victor thankfully remembered to plug in his phone. “Mm, good morning.”

“Mr. Nikiforov?”

“Yes, hello?”

“Hi, it’s Irina! I’ve got your labs from a couple days ago here.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I’m sure you were expecting it, but you’re in very good health. Your testosterone levels are actually a little bit higher than most cisgender women, though still within normal range of course.”

“Oh, really?”

“Absolutely. It’s probably because you’re a professional athlete, exercising regularly and vigorously can increase levels a little. It’s okay, it gives us a good starting point. Your estrogen levels are completely normal too. Um, let’s see… Your iron is a little bit low, but everything else looks very good.”

“Oh,” Victor says, as a huge flood of relief crashes over him. He sits down on the floor.

“We can go over your labs more in depth when you get here. I have two schedule openings for you to come in today, one at one in the afternoon and one at three. What would be the most–”

“One,” Victor interrupts. “One is fine.”

There’s a pause, and some typing. “Okay, one it is. I’ll see you soon, Victor.”

“Yeah,” Victor says quietly. Irina hangs up, and Victor is left there, on the floor with his phone still pressed to his ear. He forces himself to take a deep, slow breath in, and then a deep, slow breath out, and then he flops back on the ground and stares up at the ceiling. He presses fingers to the pulse point in his neck and counts, then rests his hand on his stomach. All of his nerves feel alive right now, adrenaline coursing through him. He has to make himself eat and shower, and then he has to take several more deep breaths in the rental car so his hands don’t shake while he drives. The fifteen minute commute to the hospital seems to take ages, and Victor has to carefully hold himself back from flat-out running into the lobby.

“As I said on the phone, you’re very healthy,” Irina says, sitting with him on her couch instead of at her desk. “Do you want to see your labs?”

Victor shakes his head. “I wouldn’t understand most of it.”

“Alright. Well, I’ll send you back with a copy of your blood work and you can give them to your primary physician. The patches we’re going to prescribe you are under the brand name Testoderm TTS. We’re going to start you off with just the four milligram dose, to start off slowly like you said, and we can increase that later if you decide you like how things are going. How do you feel about that?”

Victor nods. “Good. That’s good.”

“Good.” Irina produces a packet of five stapled sheets of paper with a fuzzy, black and white image of a bandaid-like patch on it. It has expected effects and side effects and warnings and availability details on it. She walks Victor through each line of the packet, and he nods along with her. The side effects aren’t incredible, but he can live with them.

“We do carry these in the pharmacy here, so you can fill it today,” Irina says. “The boxes have a thirty day supply or a ninety day supply, but I think we can do mail delivery for an extra fee.”

“That’s fine.”

“These aren’t cheap, you know. I know that’s not as important to you as taking it slow and having better control over your hormone levels, but it will certainly cost over seven thousand rubles a month.”

“That’s okay.”

“Are you alright, Victor?” Irina asks. She looks him up and down, not in the lingering way that confused people often do but like she’s trying to assess him for any points of pain. “Do you need a moment?”

“No, I’m alright. It’s just… overwhelming,” Victor admits. He twists his fingers through his bangs and kind of misses his long hair. It was something to pull against, at least. “I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time.”

Irina nods. “Lots of people feel like that. It’s a big step to take, but you know what’s right for you.”

Victor bobs his head in agreement.

“Well, I think the best thing for your situation would be to get a ninety day supply. That way, just in case there’s an issue with the mail delivery, you’ll be set for a while. Does that sound okay?”

“How much is the ninety day box?”

“Ah… Twenty thousand rubles, or close to that.”

“Okay.”

Irina blinks at him a few times at the easy acceptance, then shakes her head. “Alright, then. There’s paperwork to fill out, of course, and then I can write this script for you. How does that sound?”

Victor can only nod again, but Irina understands. There are a lot of forms, but she walks him through these too and he signs and initials where she points. She gets him a copy of his blood work and then, when he’s signed off on the last page, she goes to her desk and gets a prescription pad and scrawls out a prescription for three months of testosterone like it’s nothing.

“Follow the signs to the pharmacy, and you should be able to get that filled quickly enough.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll figure out how to schedule a follow up appointment to see how you’re doing,” Irina says. “You may have to take a weekend trip to Moscow.”

Victor nods. “That’s fine.”

Irina smiles softly at him. “Alright. Good luck, Victor. I’ll be in touch soon.”

She shows him out, and then Victor practically floats down to the pharmacy. He hands over the script and sits around for twenty-five minutes, reading the labels of over the counter cough medicine and trying not to hyperventilate, and then his name is called. People turn to look when they hear it, but Victor keeps his head down as he approaches the counter. The pharmacist gives a very short, perfunctory explanation of how to use the patches – once a day, over bare skin, leave it on all day, change it when he showers, expect some mild irritation and call if things seem weird. Victor hands over his credit card and signs the receipt, and then he does run to the rental car and yanks the box out of the bag. It’s pretty big, and when he pulls the top open, it’s very full of small, wrapped up patches with little bubbles in the middle. Victor takes one and holds it up, trying to see through the wrapping, and then has to set it down so that he doesn’t rip it open and stick it onto himself right then. He should wait. He has to take a shower first, and tomorrow is just going to be driving and driving for nine hours and he doesn’t want to itch during that. It would not be a good idea to just stick this on a body part without even washing the area first.

Victor tears the patch open, peels back the adhesive cover, and sticks it on his stomach. It looks like a round bandage, and it feels like one too. He presses down around the edges to make sure it doesn’t get unstuck, then sits back in the driver’s seat of the car and stares at it until someone who wants his parking space honks. He drives back to the hotel in a reverie, and strips off his shirt and his binder when he gets there, staring at himself in the hotel mirror. Absolutely nothing is different except for the awkward patch that doesn’t match his skin at all.

But Victor stares at it anyway, and hopes.

~

As soon as he gets back to Saint Petersburg, before he even goes home, he goes to the rink with his paperwork. Yakov looks a little surprised to see him - it’s late in the afternoon and Victor’s not supposed to be back until tomorrow and he definitely looks like he’s been driving for nine hours - but Victor walks past him and straight to the medics’ offices. Fortunately, his usual doctor is on staff and she looks up from paperwork and smiles. “Hi, Victor.”

Victor holds up his folder triumphantly. “I got it.”

Her face breaks out into a grin. “Congratulations! That’s great.”

“I know.” Victor pulls up his shirt and pushes down the waistband of his jeans so she can see the patch stuck to his hip. “It’s my second day.”

“You’ll start to first feel it in about four or five weeks, I think,” the medic says. “Come on, sit down, let’s get this all filed.”

They go through the packet again, Victor pointing out the underlined bits this time and the medic typing things into her computer and copying information into Victor’s file. Victor gets excited all over again reading the timeline of expected changes. The medic teases him a little bit about male pattern baldness and Victor pretends to gasp and cover his hair with his hands. They come up with a new exercise plan which involves a lot more weight lifting than Victor usually does. But he feels hopeful. It’s going to be hard, but it’s going to be _doable_ and that’s the best part.

It’s after six when he comes back out. Yakov is in the office like he usually is in the evenings, so Victor comes in and closes the door and drops down in the seat and kicks his feet on the desk like a student.

“Yes, Vitya, hello,” Yakov says, unimpressed.

“I went on hormones,” Victor tells him.

“You did what?”

“I went on hormones. Testosterone. Patches. Wanna see?” He reaches for his waistband again and Yakov holds his hands up.

“No, I don’t want to see. You went on testosterone?”

“Yep.”

“Is that where you were this week?”

“In Moscow, yes.”

Yakov still looks bemused. “That won’t get you in trouble, will it? I know you’re not so stupid as to not have consulted anyone about that.”

Victor rolls his eyes. “Of course. I talked to the Club medical staff, they said it was fine.”

“Good. And this won’t count as doping?”

“It’ll only bring my testosterone levels up to where everyone else’s are. In racing, they make you start hormones before you can participate at a professional level,” Victor says.

“But, as I’m sure you know, this isn’t racing.”

“It’s okay, Yakov. This is good,” Victor says. He drops his feet off the desk to lean his elbows on it instead. “This is good for me.”

Yakov studies him for a moment. “What will happen to you?”

“Mm, deeper voice. Better musculature. Thinner hips. Body hair. I think it’ll kind of fill out some places, like my jaw and shoulders. That sort of thing. It’s a little late to get any extra height, but that’s okay.” Victor is buzzing with excitement. There’s so much possibility inside him now.

Yakov presses his fingertips together over the desk. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Victor doesn’t either. He gets a little anxious the longer Yakov looks at him. He’s not going to stop, not when his body is so close to looking like what he wishes it looked like, and he’s prepared to argue with Yakov about it until Yakov gives in.

But Yakov says, “And this will make you stop feeling so unhappy with yourself?”

That catches Victor by surprise a little, but he nods. “It’ll help. It’ll be better.”

Yakov nods slowly. “Well. I already watched you go through puberty once. I don’t see why I can’t do it again.”

Victor blinks, and then he laughs, relief rushing through him again. Yakov looks amused and he sits back in his seat.

“You should go to the gym more. If you’re going to get biceps, you may as well go all in.”

“I will. It’ll be great. I can switch to pairs skating.”

“You’d be wasted in pair skating. I need my star in the men’s division.”

Victor glows a little.

“Now get out of here. You still have to show up at seven tomorrow.”

“Yes, Coach Yakov,” Victor says. “There’s paperwork in the medical office, if you want to look at it.”

Yakov grunts and waves his hand. Victor stands up and zips his jacket up and heads out of the office and out of the Club and goes to return his rental car and pick up his dog and lay out his patches for the next week.

~

Victor wakes up a few hours before the men’s free program at Skate Canada. He rolls around in his hotel bed for a bit, then hauls himself up and showers. He orders room service when he gets out, wrapping himself up in one of the hotel’s fluffy robes and toweling off his hair with one of the hotel’s fluffy towels. Room service is fast, and they knock only ten minutes after he’d called.

He answers the door and greets the hotel staff in French. Her gaze lands on his face and travels down to somewhere around his chin and sticks, and then it darts back up to his eyes. Victor frowns a little as she distractedly rattles off his order and then produces a receipt for him to sign. Victor skims over it – he’s not nearly as good at reading French as he is at speaking it – and leaves what he thinks it a good tip and signs off. A cart is wheeled into his room, and the woman gives him one last slightly odd look before she disappears back down the hall. Victor closes the door, but he frowns after her for a moment. Surely it’s not surprising to see him, it’s not like there are no other world famous skaters in the building. There are probably another five on this floor. And it’s very well known that Skate Canada is happening. Victor shakes his head and forgets as he sits down to eat and doesn’t remember again until he takes the robe and the towel back into the bathroom to hang up. He glances at himself in the mirror as he walks past it, and then stops dead.

The next two minutes are a blur of panic, opening drawers and slamming them shut and digging through his suitcase to find his toiletry bag, and eventually scrambling for his phone and punching in a number.

“Vitya?” Yakov answers on the fourth ring. “What is it?”

“I grew a moustache,” Victor wails.

There’s silence on the other end.

“Yakov! Help me!”

“You grew… a moustache,” Yakov repeats slowly.

“Yes! And the free skate is in three hours and how am I supposed to go out and skate when I have this on my face?” Victor scratches at the hairs that he somehow didn’t notice on his upper lip. Now that he’s aware of them, he can’t stop feeling them.

“You grew a moustache,” Yakov says again.

“Yes, Yakov, I did, and I need you to help me!”

There’s more silence, and then a sigh. “What room are you in again?”

Victor rattles off his room number. Yakov hangs up and Victor scrambles around for a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. A minute later, there’s another, more aggressive knock. Victor peers through the peephole to make sure that it’s not anyone he doesn’t want to see, then throws the door open despairingly.

Victor stares at Yakov. Yakov stares at Victor.

Yakov bursts out laughing.

“It’s not funny!” Victor says. He drags Yakov into the room by his sleeve and slams the door shut behind him. “This wasn’t here yesterday!”

Yakov is still laughing. He grabs Victor by the shoulders and turns him around so he’s facing the light. It’s a very, very bad moustache, thin and bristly and wholly unattractive on anyone, ever, in all of history. Victor had felt a little prickly the night before but attributed it to being tired and in Canada, and now there is _hair_ on his _face_ and he doesn’t know what to do.

“Yakov,” Victor hisses. “I don’t know how to shave a moustache.”

Yakov is wheezing. He turns away a little bit, but he’s rubbing his face with his sleeve. Victor crosses his arms and glares, but he can only imagine what glaring looks like with this thing on his face. He storms back to the bathroom and stares at himself. It looks so unequivocally awful that he can’t even consider keeping it. If he were back home in Russia, maybe he could appreciate the novelty of growing facial hair, however unpleasant, for the first time, but right now he’s nearly four thousand miles from home, with no razor, and thousands of people he has to stand in front of and Yakov is _still laughing at him_.

“Yakov,” Victor says again, more insistently. “What do I do.”

“Shave it off, obviously,” Yakov says, looking a little teary from laughter. “You can’t go to an event like that.”

“I don’t have a razor.”

“Not for your legs or anything?”

“No, I stopped shaving my legs when I didn’t have to wear tights anymore,” Victor says. “The hair doesn’t catch in pants. Can I use yours?”

“My pants?”

“No, your– _Yakov_. There is a _silver caterpillar_ on my _face_ and I need to get rid of it _right now_ and do you have a razor I can borrow or not?”

Yakov’s face twitches a few times. Victor raises his eyebrows.

Yakov starts laughing again.

Victor throws his hands up in the air and digs through his suitcase for a clean shirt. “Well, I was going to spend time preparing for my very important figure skating competition tonight, but I guess I’m going out to find a drug store and buy a razor when everything is in _Canadian French_.”

“Relax, Vitya, relax. Just go down to the hotel lobby. They have little shops down there.”

“And I’ll just wrap a scarf halfway around my head.”

“It’s a good plan,” Yakov says. He’s clearly trying not to start laughing again, and he won’t look at Victor’s face anymore. “You should hurry.”

Victor grumbles and turns away and yanks off his shirt, then stuffs himself into the binder that he’s glad he decided to bring. He pulls his shirt back on and digs his credit card and room key out of his wallet, then digs a face mask out of his suitcase that he would usually reserve for travel and puts it on, and stomps over to the door. “If you’re not going to help…”

“I don’t know what you expect me to do,” Yakov says. “This–” he gestures at the top of his head, which boasts a small but noticeable bald spot “–was not on purpose.”

“You’ve shaved a face before.”

“Yes. Mine.”

“Well, how do you do it?”

“Get shaving cream, shave upwards, and for the love of God, do not let anyone else see this.”

“Helpful,” Victor grumbles. “Come on.”

Yakov veritably saunters out of Victor’s room and Victor slams the door behind him. They head in opposite directions, Yakov back to his room and Victor to the lobby, quietly moving his upper lip up and down to feel how weird it is to have the bristly hairs touching his skin.

He buys two razors, shaving cream, toothpaste, and new deodorant at the tiny shop in the lobby. They seem like things someone would buy together, and it looks a little less on the nose than just buying the razor. Victor stuffs it all into his pockets and runs back upstairs to his room, then drops his cards on the bed and goes back into the bathroom.

The moustache does not look any better at all.

Victor washes his face, rubbing his fingertips against the hair, then squirts shaving cream into his hand and smears it all over his jaw. Then he unboxes a razor, runs it under the water, and stares at it.

It takes a bit of trial and error, but it’s kind of like shaving a leg, just much more awkward. The angle is difficult to get right and Victor cuts himself at least twice. He washes all the shaving cream off and sees two spots that he missed, which seems impossible given how thin the moustache is, so he does it again, very carefully peering at himself in the mirror. It stings a little where he’s nicked himself already, and when he rinses off again and the nicks are still bleeding, he sticks little piece of toilet paper to them like he’s seen in movies. He looks absolutely ridiculous and he kind of hates that he can’t enjoy his first time shaving because he has to be at the rink in an hour and a half and Yakov is probably going to laugh at him again when he sees Victor with a tiny little bandaid over his lip.

He remembers something about aftershave but he doesn’t know what aftershave is, let alone what he’s supposed to use it for, so he just digs makeup out of his bag, pops the little bloody toilet paper bits off, and does his foundation like normal. This season’s costumes are a little more sparkly and flamboyant than last year’s, but Victor doesn’t mind the makeup and the glitter nearly as much as he used to, so he’s okay with smudging smokey eyeshadow on his eyelids and touching glitter to his hair. Up close, it’s too dramatic, of course, but when he’s on the ice, it will look perfect and that’s really the only time it matters. It all sits fine, except in one spot that was still a little bloody before the foundation and makes an ugly, reddish smudge when Victor tries to clean it up, so he sighs and shoves his face in the sink to wash it all off and start over.

He meets Yakov in the hotel lobby an hour later, wearing his warm-up track suit with his costume and his skates in his bag. Yakov is talking to one of the women’s skaters, but he perks up when Victor arrives. “Ah, the man of the hour! How did it go?”

“It was a pain in the ass,” Victor says.

“A burden you’ll just have to bear.” Yakov still seems much too amused, especially right before a competition, when he usually gets very intense. “You can hardly even tell.”

The other skater looks baffled. Victor tries very hard not to look at her. “Let’s go. I want to get good warm-up time.”

As expected, under spotlights, he looks fine. As expected, he dominates the free skate and wins the whole of Skate Canada. He tries to avoid looking into cameras head on, always moving and grinning and holding his medal up in front of his face, just in case anyone can tell. He goes out and drinks with a some of the other skaters. The bronze medal winner, Mr. Jeffrey Canada, is from the next province over, and he makes incredibly rapid small talk with locals, to whom he seems to be a little bit of a national hero. Fourth place is also from Canada and very friendly with Mr. Jeffrey Canada, and Victor sits there and poses for pictures with fans while the two of them talk about Ontario and a drunk Mr. Jeffrey Canada keeps yelling ‘Maaabeeee!’ over and over.

He has a vague recollection of walking back to his hotel, showering, and then passing out. He wakes up fuzzy but not too badly hung over in the morning to pounding on his hotel room door. He grunts and rubs his face with one hand as he gets up and lumbers over to the door and opens it.

“Where have you _been_ we’re supposed to get a taxi to the airport in half an hour and we need to check out and oh god it’s back.”

“What,” Victor says sleepily, but Yakov has him by the shoulder and is marching him into the bathroom. Victor blinks a few times and, sure enough, the awful, bristly, awful, thin, awful awful awful facial hair is back.

“Deal with this,” Yakov says. The corner of his mouth is twitching a little bit. “Be downstairs in ten minutes.”

Victor mumbles something to the affirmative, then shoves Yakov out the door. To Yakov’s credit, he doesn’t start laughing again until the door is shut and Victor is glaring at his upper lip in the mirror.

~

Victor takes gold at the Trophée in Paris.

Victor takes gold at the Grand Prix Final in Turin.

Victor turns twenty alone with his dog, in his apartment, because Yakov is having some sort of marital disaster so no one is around to coach him at the rink.

Victor spends New Years alone with his dog, in his apartment, because Yakov is having some sort of marital disaster so no one has an open home for him to go to.

Victor takes gold at Nationals.

Victor takes gold at Europeans.

Victor takes gold at Worlds.

Victor does the whole cycle over again, with a little bronze hiccup at the Cup of China, and piles his medal box high with gold.

Victor doesn’t remember much of it, save for the high of flying up into the air and being weighed back down with gold. Competitions and faces start to blend together, but the feeling of standing on a podium never changes.

~

On Tuesday, right at the end of the season, Victor runs into a junior skater while trying to learn  how to do a quad Lutz. He sees the boy’s head whip around as if in slow motion, and then the pointed heel of his blade jams into the ice and the knee of his free leg jerks to the side. There’s a very loud popping noise, and then something in his leg is suddenly cold, and then very hot. It’s only once he’s lying on his back on the ice that it very briefly hurts like someone is jamming their fingers into his muscles and ripping them out, strand by strand. Someone yells and Victor squeezes his eyes shut, trying not to pay attention to the hands that are gripping his arm - if he doesn’t open them, then he doesn’t have to see the rink medic gliding over on poorly sharpened skates with a med kit and a stretcher tucked under his arm.

He’s whisked off to the nearest sports med hospital and put through a battery of tests and scans. There’s no concussion, which is good, but Victor hears _torn ACL_ and his heart sinks. Torn ACLs can be a whole season gone, four months bare minimum to heal and more than that to get back into form. He doesn’t have that kind of time before the Grand Prix series starts.

Yakov is furious, in a muted sort of way. It’s not Victor’s fault and everyone knows it. But Victor is his best skater by far, now that Evgeni has retired for good, scheduled for appearances in three Grand Prix events and Nationals and Europeans in the next eight months alone. He yells vaguely, because that’s how Yakov expresses concern (and every other emotion), and Victor sits in his hospital bed and nods mutely as he looks over documents for reconstruction surgery.

It kind of aches all day and night, and then it doesn’t hurt while Victor is knocked out and his leg is cut into, and then it doesn’t feel like anything when the nurse ups his morphine drip and everything is hazy and warm and funny. Yakov visits the hospital again and puts up with Victor grabbing at his jacket sleeves and pulling them back and forth while he gets Victor’s prognosis. Victor laughs at the color Yakov’s face turns when he finds out that Victor will be in a brace on and off until September.

He overnights again, during which time a couple other skaters come to visit him. Georgi Popovich, a Senior skater who’d just transferred to Yubileyny a couple months ago, looks more upset than Victor himself is, though Victor is still flying high and spends five minutes laughing about Georgi’s pointy hair while Georgi waxes on about how awful it is and how bad the entire Junior class feels. Victor reaches out and pokes the point, which barely moves with all the gel in it, and Georgi’s face makes Victor laugh and laugh until he abruptly falls asleep again.

The next day, Yakov hires someone from the hospital to make sure Victor gets home okay. Victor’s leg is in a gauged brace and he has strict orders on how to stretch and rest it until a physical therapist comes to help him start rehabilitation in a few weeks. The woman who comes into Victor’s small apartment and moves things around so that he’ll be able to get around on crutches gives him several printed sheets of instructions and a phone number to call if he needs anything as she fends off Makkachin’s defensive nudges. Victor nods politely and lets her set him up on the couch with his leg elevated on several pillows and his crutches within reach. She double checks everything, and then heads out, leaving Victor alone.

Victor looks at the television, which is playing some movie that he’s never seen, and then down at his phone, and then tilts his head back and closes his eyes. He feels sore all over, probably from the landing and the hospital bed, and his leg aches. His head aches too - he doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself for at least the two weeks before he’s allowed to put weight on his leg. He’ll get very good at using his crutches, probably.

He whistles and Makkachin climbs up onto the couch. He sniffs all over Victor, and then at Victor’s knee, and whines. “I know,” Victor says without opening his eyes. “I don’t like it either.”

Makkachin touches Victor’s knee brace with his nose, then barks at it.

“Hey. Shush.” Victor reaches up and curls his hand around the back of Makkachin’s neck and guides his head into his lap instead. “Are you going to eat my crutches?”

Makkachin doesn’t say anything. He rests one paw on Victor’s thigh and gets comfortable, then closes his eyes. Even now, Victor feels immensely comforted by the weight of the dog on top of him.

He watches television until he has to pee, and then he awkwardly maneuvers himself to the bathroom and has to sit sideways on the toilet because he can’t extend his leg without running into the wall. He really needs a bigger apartment - this one has been too convenient to leave, but Victor can afford much, much better with much more space and a bathroom where he can pee while injured in peace. Getting up is a little difficult and he falls into the door and grunts, then corrects himself again to wash his hands. He’s played with other people’s crutches before, but it’s so much harder when he legitimately can’t use one leg.

He uses a washcloth and hand soap to wash the top half of himself. He doesn’t remember how they said to take showers and he doesn’t really want to try, but he feels like he’s wrapped in stale sweat and it’s awful and he needs to get it all off of him. He scrubs himself down as well as he can, and he has to pay attention to his chest like this. There’s just not really any way of avoiding it. He does it fast, but it’s still unpleasant, and he fantasizes for the millionth time about not having to feel it weighing the front of him down, if only he ever had the time to deal with it.

He sets the washcloth down and looks at his crutches.

His blood stream gets a shot of adrenaline straight into his heart and suddenly he can barely breathe. He grips the sides of the sink and meets the gaze of his reflection’s bowed head. He looks at the crutches again.

“Don’t be stupid,” he tells himself out loud.

But the hope is there.

Victor paces around on his crutches a little, partly to practice and partly to tire himself out so he’ll just go to sleep and not think about things. Makkachin wanders in and complains until Victor feeds him, then eats and wanders out again. Victor makes himself a cup of tea and drinks it leaning against the counter, and then makes another one and takes it to the couch and lets it go cold.

He finds a number saved in his phone that he hasn’t used in a while and hits the _call_ button before he can lose his nerve. It rings for a while, and then a woman answers, “Good afternoon, this is Irina.”

“Hi. This is Victor Nikiforov.”

There’s a short pause, then, “Oh! Victor, how are you? It’s been a little while.”

“I just had reconstructive surgery on my knee.”

“Oh!” Irina says again. “For what? Break or tear?”

“I tore my ACL.”

“Oh, that’s such a shame.”

“Yeah. That’s half the season gone for me. It’s not very good.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” There’s a bit of tapping in the background. “So, can I do something for you?”

“I want surgery.”

A beat of silence. “What?”

“I want to get top surgery. Chest reconstruction surgery. A mastectomy. Whatever the surgical name for it is.”

“Okay, yes, I do understand.”

“I won’t be allowed to skate for four months,” Victor says. “I’m twenty-one, I won’t have another gap like this for years, maybe until the end of my career. I’m not even supposed to walk around much. Please.” He runs his hand through greasy hair and tugs at it lightly. “I need to do this and this is my only chance.”

There’s silence on the other end for a long moment, and then Irina says, “I don’t know of anyone in Moscow who has open consultation slots in the next few weeks–”

“I can pay.”

“Are you… bribing me?”

“What? No, of course not. I can just pay to be seen soon, if the appointments are expensive. I want this process to move quickly.”

“I know,” Irina says. “Everyone does.”

Victor gnaws at the inside of his mouth, which still tastes bad from the hospital. “Is there anything that I can do to make this happen in the time I have?”

There’s silence again, and then Irina says, “I’ll see who I can find.”

Relief floods through Victor. “Thank you.”

“Nothing immediate,” Irina warns. “You definitely won’t get a consultation for at least a week, and no surgical date for longer than that.”

“That’s fine. I can’t walk yet anyway.”

“Okay.” There’s typing in the background. Victor listens intently to it like he’ll be able to make out the words she’s typing. “I have an appointment… really soon, actually, with another patient, but after that, I’ll see if we have anyone. I’ll check in with Saint Petersburg too.”

“That would be preferable. I have a dog now.”

“Oh, yes, I think I read something about that. Moppa something?”

“Makkachin.”

“Such a sweet name. Okay, well… I’ll see what I can find for you.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay. Talk to you soon, Victor.”

She hangs up and Victor sets his phone delicately to the side, and then for the first time in possibly years starts to cry.

 

Four mind-numbingly dull days pass. Victor tries to pretend to navigate a normal life, and fails. He spends so many hours at the rink that he has no backup plan when he can’t. He usually walks Makkachin a couple miles every day, so he doesn’t feel right sitting on the steps of his building throwing a tennis ball over and over. Makkachin doesn’t seem to mind much and he still runs around a lot, but Victor misses going on long walks together. He makes boring, easy food for dinner than he can cook without too much work, and eats on the couch instead of a chair. It’s so dull that he wants to scream, but he doesn’t have the energy.

Irina calls early in the morning. Victor had fallen asleep on the couch and he startles awake, then grunts at the dull stab of pain in his leg. He fumbles around for his phone and answers with a sleepy, “Da.”

“Hi, Victor? It’s Irina.”

“Mm. Hi.”

“Hi. I was calling to let you know that I found a surgeon in Saint Petersburg who may be able to schedule you in.”

Victor sits bolt upright and flinches as it makes his knee twinge.

“Really?”

“Yes. He’ll be able to give you his schedule better than I am, but it sounds like he has a pretty quick consult to surgery ratio, and three potential openings in the next few weeks.”

Victor is barely breathing.

“Do you have a pen and paper? I can give you his information.”

Victor scrambles for his laptop and opens a google search page. “Yes, okay.”

She gives him the name of the surgeon, his phone number, and his website. Victor copies them all down with shaky fingers.

“He’s… not inexpensive,” Irina says. “It’s a private, specialized practice, and it’s pretty costly.”

“I don’t care,” Victor says immediately. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“I know, Victor,” Irina says. “Give him a call. See if you can get some time. And let me know if you can’t and I’ll keep looking for you.”

“Okay. Of course. Thank you.”

“Good luck, Victor.”

Victor does crutch paces around the apartment for a little while. He takes Makkachin out and leans against the building as Makkachin pees on a tree trunk. He makes himself eat breakfast until it’s a little later in the work day, and then he gets that phone number and dials it in and calls.

A receptionist answers. “This is Dr. Kirill’s office, what can I do for you?”

“I’m calling about a possible top surgery consultation appointment,” Victor says. “My name is Victor Nikiforov.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then, “Oh. Oh!”

There’s some quiet speaking in the background. Victor shifts uncomfortably on his couch.

“I think your endocrinologist called a couple of hours ago. How– how are you doing?”

“As well as can be expected, I guess,” Victor says. He hesitates for a second, trying to decide if he wants to be polite and indulge her curiosity about his career, and then he isn’t. “And yes, she recommended me your practice for your rapid turnaround time.”

“Oh, I’m not– I mean, yes, Dr. Kirill is very good at that. He likes to get patients in and out.”

“So… is there room in the schedule for one more consultation?”

The receptionist doesn’t answer right away. There’s more talking in the background. Victor can hear her voice, and someone else, more masculine, responding. He taps his fingers against his couch. His blood is too full of adrenaline.

A voice comes back, but it’s a different voice this time. “Hello.”

“Uh… hello,” Victor says. “Is this Protasov Kirill?”

“That’s me,” the voice agrees. “And you’re Victor Nikiforov.”

“Yes,” Victor says. “I was trying to schedule a consultation as soon as I can.”

“Yes, I heard about your injury,” Kirill says. “It’s a shame that you have to miss the beginning of the season. My daughter, she’s a big fan of yours.”

“Well, I’ll sign something for her if I can come in.”

Kirill chuckles. There’s an odd sort of tone to it that Victor can’t place, but he feels desperate and he’s willing to ignore it.

“So Irina– I mean, my endocrinologist– said that your practice has a fast turnaround.”

“Patients tend to overestimate _fast_ , but I think in a case like yours, perhaps I can make an exception,” Kirill says.

That makes Victor pause for a second. “A case like mine.”

“Your schedule is no secret. The quicker you heal, the quicker you return to competition, after all,” Kirill says. “And I would love to be the surgeon to assist you with that. Figure skating’s official top surgeon.”

He laughs softly to himself, like it’s a joke. Victor narrows his eyes a little, but he’s seen this before, every time he spends money on something. People love to be the ones who help him.

There’s some typing now, and then a mouse clicking. “I’m afraid that I have absolutely nothing for the next week and a half, but next Thursday at seven at night–”

“That’s fine,” Victor interrupts.

“The thing is, it’s technically overtime, and the appointment would cost more–”

“I don’t care. Book it.”

“Well… Very well.” There’s more typing. “As far as surgery…”

“As soon as possible,” Victor says firmly.

“As soon as possible looks to be late June,” Kirill says. “Maybe early July.”

“You don’t have anything sooner?”

“We don’t. This is a fairly rapid turnaround, honestly, from making an appointment to surgery in a month and a half is unusual. We try to be as accommodating to our patients as possible, but you’re certainly not the only one having this type of surgery in Saint Petersburg.”

Victor has twin flashes of resentment for all the other men in Saint Petersburg who are getting surgery before him and desire to meet at least one of them so he doesn’t feel quite so _other_. “I guess.”

“If there are any cancellations, I’m sure we’ll be in touch,” Kirill says. “But for now, let’s confirm your consultation, alright?”

Victor gives as much information as he can, and then hefts himself up on crutches and hobbles over to get his medical card out of his wallet and reads off his ID numbers. He gets an appointment for next Thursday at seven at night. He’s not sure how he’s going to get to the office, but he’s going to find a way.

He calls Irina back and leaves a message letting her know it went well. He sinks back onto the couch and scrubs his face with his hands, and then lets his hands drop to his chest. He’s not bothering with binding or even a sports bra right now - being alone, at home, injured, mostly means loose, comfortable shirts and sweatpants, and the discomfort is less because no one is going to look at Victor except Victor. He pushes his hands under his shirt and cups his chest, squeezes the skin a little, flattens his palms to his body. He tries to imagine all of this being gone. He’s had breasts of one size or another since he was eleven and he’s twenty-one now and it’s been ten years of this. He hasn’t hated every moment - at times, it’s even been kind of nice, to be soft and kind of curved, and four years of binding and two years of testosterone have changed the shape of things. But he’s still absolutely desperate to make it all go away.

The next ten days are a special kind of hell. If Victor thought he was bored and restless before, that was nothing compared to now. Makkachin is starting to get restless too; Victor takes him outside and keeps throwing toys for him, but it’s not as good as a long walk. Victor sighs and strokes his head and apologizes. Makkachin noses at his knee brace and whines.

Victor works out a lot. He does his physical therapy every other day, as he was ordered to. He has dumbbells of varying sizes in his closet for home training, so he lifts all of them in various combinations at various times. He does sit-ups with his good leg tucked under the couch to brace against. It’s the only thing that makes him feel at all productive, and he’s read that having good musculature makes top surgery easier. Not that Victor isn’t already pretty solid, because he has to be when he throws himself up in the air and spins four times, but he’s more than a little into the idea of having good pectorals.

After an eternity, he gets a cab to Kirill’s office at six thirty on Thursday night. He ends up having to wait until after seven ten, but it’s worth it.

The consultation is good, mostly. He speaks with a nurse about the general process, the cost of outpatient surgery versus staying a night in a hospital (Victor doesn’t have to stay overnight but he wants to because he doesn’t want to try to get home alone and freshly cut open), the usual risks that come with chest surgery, allergies and anesthesia, what to do to get ready and what to avoid. Victor signs a lot of forms stating that he’s been informed of the risks and wants to get cut open anyway. The nurse gives him a packet of instructions and frequently asked questions that looks more like a user’s manual for breast owners than anything else.

Then he meets Kirill, which is more uncomfortable. Kirill seems like a fine person, but he has to do a chest examination, and Victor is tired of being analyzed and his skin crawls. He turns his head and closes his eyes for the physical exam as gloved fingers manipulate his skin, lifting and measuring and squeezing. Then Kirill gets a camera and moves Victor to a blank wall and makes him turn in several directions so they can get some pre-surgery reference pictures. Victor swallows down his utter hatred for this part and tilts his head so that his bangs drape over his face, which doesn’t hide him but at least makes him feel hidden.

While he gets dressed again, Kirill gets a leather-bound book and sets it on the desk. He goes through it with Victor page by page. It’s a photo album, full of pairs of pictures of befores and afters. Kirill gets a little pad of sticky notes and has Victor point out the ones that he likes the best. Victor is honestly not too picky about this - he doesn’t qualify for periareolar surgery, so scars are scars to him, as long as they’re just the two. But he picks a few that he thinks look good and Kirill marks them with the sticky notes and then brings the book back to his computer and writes up some notes.

It’s after eight when he turns to Victor and says, “If you don’t have anymore questions, I think we can schedule your surgery now.”

It was the outcome Victor expected, but some part of him had held back out of fear and that part opens the floodgates of electricity into his blood as he says, “Really?”

“Yes, really. We’re very solidly booked until… Late June, I think I said, so around the twenty-fifth or later. Depending on your schedule.”

“I’m not training,” Victor says. “I have no schedule. I’ll take the next one open.”

Kirill looks at his computer, then types some things in. “Here, come look.”

Victor leans on his crutches and looks over Kirill’s shoulder. True to his word, there are greyed out appointment slots from now until June twenty-eighth, and then a few in July that were scheduled for date and not timing.

“That one,” Victor says, pointing at June thirtieth.

“This one is for ten thirty in the morning. Is that–”

“That’s fine. It’s fine, I’ll get to the hospital,” Victor interrupts.

Kirill chuckles. “I’m sure you will.”

They talk logistics a little, about hospital stays and what to expect in the days and weeks after. Victor is floating, but Kirill underlines things in his guide to how to get breasts cut off so he can go back to it later. He prints out appointment slips and adds a note to call Victor in a week to make sure everything is finalized. Victor nods and shakes his hand and is escorted out, and then he sits down in the hall with his forehead against his knees and just breathes. He feels so hopeful that it aches inside him. It’s an under-rotated quad flip that he’s so close to completing. It’s just within his reach, and it’ll be in his hands soon, if only he can allow it to come to him. But he wants it, so desperately and so badly. He wants to stop binding and he wants to stop damaging his ribs. He wants to stop the quick, confused up and down look that people give him when they see his curved, five foot seven frame and make the connection that _he_ is men’s skating champion Victor Nikiforov, and then the embarrassed smile afterwards. He’s never been what people expected, but it would be nice to leave that one particular missed expectation behind.

He breaks the news to the Yubileyny medics and Yakov in person. The club medics aren’t surprised, though they do make him give them all of his information and his appointment slips and do their own exam and demand to be updated regularly. Yakov is kind of bemused and doesn’t initially know what ‘top surgery’ is, but after Victor feels slightly humiliated and explains it to him, he claps him on the shoulder and tells him that he supports whatever Victor needs to do to get himself healthy again. It’s a very un-Yakov-like thing to say, Victor thinks, but Yakov is one of the few people who has seen Victor’s struggle with himself over the years. He watched Victor risk a broken body for a bound chest and a ruined career for a shot at the men’s division and half a decade’s worth of quiet, internal misery that Victoriya Nikiforova just won’t die. He hasn’t always understood, but he’s always been good and non-judgemental, and maybe Victor is the one who shouldn’t be surprised.

Victor gets clearance to put some weight on his knee, so he takes Makkachin for walks again. There’s a park not too far from his apartment, so they walk there and Makkachin rolls around in the grass and chases sticks that Victor throws and plays with other dogs while Victor sits on a bench and watches. Makkachin seems happier now that he’s getting more air, and a happy Makkachin helps calm Victor down. It makes things feel easier - it always has.

A month after ACL surgery, Victor is in fairly intensive physical therapy. He does a lot of knee exercises and a lot of strength training. He can feel the weakness, but he can also feel it getting stronger again. He wants to go fast, but his physical therapist slows him down, and it’s for the best. When left to his own devices, Victor likes to pick.

He works out and lifts weights and does deep knee bends and walks his dog. Sometimes he goes to the rink to watch practice. A lot of people are on vacation, since there aren’t many events people have to go to in May and June, but some people are still here, working on next season’s programs. Victor limps down to the barrier and helps some of the Juniors with their jump sequences, and they look at him with stars in their eyes.

The night before surgery, Georgi comes to Victor’s apartment to pick up Makkachin and Victor is a nervous wreck. Georgi sits him down and makes tea and tells him he’ll be fine. Victor knows he’ll be fine, but he feels like a mess anyway. Georgi promises that he and some of the other skaters will come visit, and then takes Makkachin back to his apartment, leaving Victor to try to sleep alone.

He doesn’t do a very good job.

He shows up for surgery and it’s a whirlwind. He’s put in a gown and on a rolling bed. All his stuff is put away into a locker for later. He signs paperwork again. He shakes Dr. Kirill’s hand and he gets tubes inserted into his arms and he takes a deep breath and counts down from ten to seven and passes out in the operating room.

He wakes up a few times, hours later, in different locations. In a post surgery room. In a hallway. In a patient room. In a different bed. It’s like pictures, but he never gets cognizant enough to tell anything.

Victor wakes up for real in the evening. He groans and rubs his face. His mouth feels like cotton and tastes vile. He wants water. He presses the call nurse button.

She comes in and looks at his chart, then comes up to his bedside. “How are you doing?”

“Thirsty,” Victor rasps.

The nurse gets him a cup of water, which Victor drinks down eagerly. “Any pain?”

“No-o?” Victor reaches down and rests one hand lightly on top of his chest. Right now, it just feels numb and tight from the surgical binder, and he can’t feel much of anything around there. “Maybe some aching.”

“Do you need any medication for that? You have a prescription which we can have filled.”

“No, I’m okay. I just need some rest.”

The nurse brings Victor more water. Victor takes his time this time and closes his eyes and leans back in bed. He feels so tired, like it was him doing the surgery. He falls asleep and wakes up in the middle of the night very hungry and very much more in pain. He eats a little and takes a pill and the cycle goes like that until he signs his discharge papers the next day.

Navigating around the apartment is hard, a lot more complicated than Victor had realized. He can’t use his crutches like this, so everywhere he walks has to be short. He tries to walk as straight as possible, because otherwise the surgical binder hurts his back, but then he keeps bumping his knee into things. He ends up walking sideways sometimes and using one crutch to nudge things out of the way. It’s an incredibly helpless feeling. He sleeps a lot.

Georgi returns Makkachin to him a couple days later. Makkachin is very excited and tries to jump on Victor but Victor shoves him down and then rubs his belly in apology. He hires a dog walker so that Makkachin can get some real exercise, because if Victor couldn’t do it before, he definitely can’t now. It helps, and it wears Makkachin out enough that he naps next to Victor in the afternoons when the angle of the sun makes a big warm spot on Victor’s bed.

Victor doesn’t feel much different until he goes back to the office for his one week checkup. All his skin is still pretty unfeelinged, and the surgical binder feels like a regular one. He closes his eyes when the nurse takes it off and hisses when he takes his first breath in and his ribs get to expand. He coughs a few times and grits his teeth as gauze and small strips of white are pulled away from his skin. The nurse gets a little pair of scissors and starts cutting at and unrolling things that Victor can’t feel, and then she takes all of the bloodied dressings away and throws them in a hazmat bin.

“Do you want to look?” the nurse asks.

Victor nods and braces himself and looks down.

Flat skin looks back at him.

It’s not clean flat skin - there are two angry looking red lines from the incisions, one of which is bleeding a little from taking off the dressing, and his nipples have surgical thread sticking out of them and they’re completely depressed at the moment. But it’s flat - not totally flat, because Victor is too muscular for that, but it’s natural looking, like any of the other male skaters Victor has looked at shirtless hundreds of times since he turned seventeen. It’s like it was supposed to be.

“What do you think?” the nurse asks, holding a little pair of scissors.

“I… I need a moment,” Victor manages.

“Of course. Take your time.”

The nurse moves around behind him, cleaning things up and making notes in his file of the time and date. Victor reaches up and traces one fingertip along the edge of one scar. It feels like nothing, but they’d assured him that that was normal - most people don’t feel much for a while. His hand shakes as he rests it on his sternum and doesn’t have to push skin out of the way.

“How does it feel?” the nurse asks as she comes back around with a pad of gauze. She nudges his arm out of the way and starts to clean up the small, torn bit of skin.

“Not like anything,” Victor says. “It’s still numb.”

“That’s okay, the nerves will regenerate and go back to normal pretty soon,” she says. “Are you alright to have Dr. Kirill come in, or do you need more time?”

Victor needs more time, but he shakes his head. “It’s alright, he can come in.”

The nurse passes him his shirt if he wants to cover up, then heads out of the room. A moment later, there’s a knock at the door and Kirill comes in, stopping by a dispenser to pull some rubber gloves out and on. “There he is. How’s the first week going?”

“Stiff,” Victor says. He lowers his shirt into his lap. “A little tricky, but I’m getting by.”

“Excellent. Oh, those look good. Very good, very good.” Kirill sits down in the rolling stool and brings an overhead light in closer to examine Victor’s incisions. He runs a finger lightly down the left one. “Can you feel this?”

“Not really.”

“You will soon. The numbness doesn’t last for too long.”

Kirill does an examination of both incisions, and then an examination of Victor’s ribs. He gets Victor scar strips and clean gauze to take home and explains how to take showers. (Victor is looking forward to taking showers very much.) He explains how often Victor can take off the surgical binder and when he can lift his arms and the amount of weight he can carry and how to keep the incisions clean.

“And no skating,” Kirill adds with a wink. “Not until November, at least.”

Victor groans. November is four months away.

“I know, I know, but it would be a shame if you stretched your scars or bled through those pretty costumes they put you in.”

Kirill helps Victor put the surgical binder back on and files post surgical check-up forms while Victor eases his shirt over his shoulders and buttons up the front. He slides slowly from the chair and eases weight back onto his knee which, after a month and a half, is holding his weight better but not perfectly. He rolls his shoulders slowly and stops when he feels the beginning of a light tug at the sides of his chest.

“Your surgery bill will be sent to your home soon,” Kirill says. “It’s not very much, I don’t believe, just the surgery and the overnight private room.”

Victor nods as he delicately pulls on his jacket.

“When they ask about the surgery,” Kirill continues, “Feel free to direct them to my practice.”

Victor turns and looks at him for a moment. Kirill looks back. The words slot into place in Victor’s brain. Advertising, should the opportunity arise. Service in exchange for word of mouth, that Victor Nikiforov would do this, so everyone else should too. Symbiotic. Just like his sponsorships.

This time, though, Victor doesn’t even mind. Kirill is a good surgeon and was nothing but reassuring for the whole process. And Victor has what he wants, which is to look like what he feels like he’s always been and to stop destroying his ribs, and he’ll tell anyone who cares to hear about it.

“Of course,” he says.

Kirill smiles. “Wonderful. And you have my card, so don’t hesitate to call if you have any questions or things don’t seem right. You have your recovery instructions from our last meeting?”

Victor nods.

“Perfect. I’d like to schedule a follow-up appointment for a month from now, just to check in on things, if you’ll come over here to look at the schedule…”

Victor makes an appointment for five weeks from now and gets a printed reminder, and then leaves. He calls a cab and rides home and carefully walks himself up the stairs to his apartment. He goes into his bathroom and takes off the binder, even though he shouldn’t, and looks at himself in the mirror. He turns from side to side and looks at the way that nothing is there anymore. His ribs look different without breast tissue above them, though it might just be the light.

Everything is still a little concave and dented inwards, but Victor doesn’t care. He loves it.

He takes some pictures for the medical staff at Yubileyny and looks at them and can’t stop smiling to himself. Makkachin pads in and tries to lick the incisions and Victor nudges him out of the bathroom, so he sits at the doorway, tail wagging, sniffing at the faint scent of iron in the air. Victor rolls his shoulders back again, very slowly, and turns to the side again to watch as nothing stands out at all. It’s how it should be.

He hates to put the binder back on, but he tolerates it. He feels deeply settled somewhere in his ribcage. Things are how they should be.

~

Recovery is a slow road, but Victor tolerates that too. Physical therapy is just a little more difficult when he can’t move his arms above shoulder height, and he relies on his therapist a lot more. She bends him and pushes him and rotates him and leaves him aching every time he sees her, but the range of his knee is slowly going back to normal.

He takes showers very carefully and not for nearly as long as he’d like. Washing is a whole new issue - before, Victor didn’t want to touch his front, but now he can’t at all. He lets soapy water run down his shoulders onto his chest and part around his still-flat nipples and fall into the tub. It’s not quite clean feeling yet, but it won’t be for a while, not until he can really put his back into scrubbing the sweat away.

After a week, he stops wearing the binder all the time and just wears it to sleep. It makes him feel so free that it’s like being naked. He can turns his body in any direction he wants. He does a spin in socks in his kitchen and breathes through it. It feels good. It feels easier.

He goes to Yubileyny for an assessment with the medical staff and shows off to everyone. His rink mates lean in and look at the scars and laugh as Victor flexes. He sits in the locker room with no shirt and doesn’t feel the need to turn away.

“You look great, Vitya,” Veronika tells him. “You look so much happier than you used to.”

Victor hadn’t really noticed, but when he thinks about it, he agrees. He feels freer than he has in a long time.

Victor spends the next couple of weeks doing little. He does physical therapy and he carefully cleans his scars. He reads too much about post-op care and has a brief panic about his nipples falling off. He goes out more, now that he can walk mostly okay, and gets dinner with his rink mates a few times and enjoys himself.

He starts walking Makkachin again. Makkachin is ecstatic, though he still doesn’t understand that Victor can’t be jumped on yet. They go to the park and Victor throws tennis balls for him and Makkachin runs in circles and barks happily. They walk by the bridge and down by the water and Victor listens to the seagulls.

He starts jogging again about a month and a half after surgery. His stamina is destroyed and he barely makes it half a mile before he has to walk. Makkachin bounds ahead, then turns around, head tilted, confused why Victor is so slow. Victor rubs his head sheepishly and sits down for a moment and drinks some water and massages the skin around his knee incisions, then jogs another half mile before he has to turn around and go home. His scars feel tight so he showers and tapes them and falls asleep.

He gets Kirill’s go ahead to start lifting weights again, and slowly, he begins to rebuild his body. He’s lost a lot of weight over the last few months, a majority of it muscle mass, and it’s a pain to rebuild. He goes to the gym at Yubileyny a few times a week to work out and be around other people. They spot him when he lifts and go two for one with him for sit ups and four for one with push ups. They tease him gently and he grins at them because it feels good to be _doing something_ again. Victor has never enjoyed stagnancy, no matter how necessary it is, and he loves being able to strip off his shirt after a good workout and not care who sees.

He doesn’t put his skates on again until the middle of November. Kirill had seen how Victor’s scars stretched and ordered him more rest time. Victor is stubborn, but not too stubborn, and they settle on two extra weeks off. Victor spends a lot of those two weeks at Yubileyny anyway, working with a choreographer from the Bolshoi because, even though the Grand Prix series is halfway over and his rink mates disappear for a week to other countries to compete, Victor doesn’t actually have any programs. The danseur he hires makes him dance in the ballet studio in Yubileyny Sports Palace proper and refuses to let him do any jumps, making him do singles in place of triples that he’ll fit in later. The music they pick is slower than Victor is used to, but Victor doesn’t have the stamina for something fast quite yet. Next year, the danseur promises him. Next year, he’ll be back up to speed and he can shred the ice apart.

Victor feels like a novice the first time he gets back on the ice. The muscle memory is still there, but the muscles themselves have died away and been rebuilt, so they’re not as reliable as they could be. He spends a couple of days just skating around, forwards and then backwards, doing lazy spins and lazy steps. The first time he falls is extremely jarring and he gets off the ice for a moment to make sure that his scars are okay, but they haven’t bled since the first week and they’re fine. It aches a little differently than it used to, but in kind of a refreshing way. He gets back on the ice and when he falls next, it doesn’t hurt as badly.

Yakov has him ease into jumps. Victor spends a day on just singles, and a day on just doubles. It’s not his first time rehabilitating skaters, Yakov says. People have knee surgeries all the time. Victor just has to go slowly.

Victor spends a full week on triples, substituting his quads for triple axels and triple flips when he practices his programs. It’s nearing December and he wants to be ready, but his knee still twinges sometimes and his chest aches when he gets too out of breath and Yakov notices and holds him back. It’s infuriating, because Victor knows he can do all of this - he’s surprising no one with anything, other than the fact that he’s back at all, and everything is something he’s done before. It just takes him so long to get there.

He falls on his first quad toe loop and Yakov nearly bans him from doing them again, like when Victor was sixteen and competing in Junior Worlds, but Victor smiles placidly as he rants and then tries again and lands it. Yakov is bright red, but he allows Victor to keep trying, and Victor slowly remembers how it feels to throw himself in the hair like he has wings and then slam himself back down again for a +3 G.O.E.

Georgi made it to the Grand Prix final this year, so Victor flies to Japan to watch. Georgi does well, but he doesn’t do _brilliantly_ , and Victor can’t stop noting all the places where he would have done something else. A later exit on that triple loop. A spin combination. A spread eagle instead of an Ina Bauer to make the jump lead in easier. Georgi gets long lectures at the kiss and cry from Yakov for both his short program and his free skate, but he gets a Grand Prix final bronze medal for the first time, so Yakov can’t be too furious with him.

Victor skips out on the banquet because his energy still isn’t where it was so he gets tired more easily, and because Yakov already didn’t want him missing training to come to Japan and he steadfastly refuses to let Victor skip another two days. So Victor flies home and goes back to the rink while Georgi does his exhibition skate and does better quads that Georgi will ever do this season.

When Yakov comes back with Georgi and the rest of his skaters in tow, everything kicks into high gear. Not everyone was in the Grand Prix finals but everyone is in Nationals, and the hours of practice get longer and harder. Victor catches himself falling behind and pushes himself harder and harder. His knee feels okay, but his chest feels tight and he can tell when he takes his shirt off that the scars have stretched. It doesn’t bother him very much, but he makes sure to wear scar strips the next day.

His programs are together and his practices are good. He feels healthy, for the most part, and he can deal with the pain just like he has for the last twelve years. He’s registered for Nationals and he has a spot on the podium, if he can manage it.

It feels, in some ways, like something above Seniors. A new transition. The next step up.

~

The first season back is a little rough. Victor only manages a bronze at Nationals and doesn’t even medal at Europeans. He’s still on the list for the Olympics, because he’s still the best in Russia, generally speaking, so he goes anyway and barely nets third place. He’d made two high difficulty programs, but his executions just aren’t as good as they usually are. He doesn’t actually beat his free skate score from the last Olympics despite having more quads. He gets a big, long rant from Yakov at the kiss and cry with his heart in his throat, and he feels a strange mix of crushing disappointment and absolute elation and quite a lot of physical pain. An American skater Victor met four years ago wins gold and Victor stands on the third spot of the podium and listens to the American national anthem for the first time.

His chest hurts a lot and his knee hurts a lot, so he gets some of his pain medication from after his surgery and takes it, and then goes out with everyone else. They wind up at a club and have a few rounds of drinks, but the alcohol mixes poorly with the pain medication and Victor ends up throwing up in an alley in Vancouver while Pretty Fifth Place American, who is Pretty Sixth Place American this year, helps hold his bangs back and gets him a glass of water. Victor leans against the wall, groaning, while Pretty Sixth Place American gets his coat and then walks him back to the village. He doesn’t remember a lot of that night, but he does remember getting back to his room and more water being pushed into his hands and throwing up again. He wakes up in the morning on his side in bed with no shirt on and a lot of sweat. There’s a trash can nudged up against the side of the bed, just in case. His phone is on the bedside table and there’s a piece of paper sitting on top of it with a phone number and a note that says _let me know how you’re doing in the morning -johnny_. Victor feels very hungover, even though he only had three and a half drinks, and he goes and sits in the shower for a while and lets the water pour into his mouth to wash away the leftover taste of bile.

He calls Pretty Sixth Place American, and he supposes he should call him Johnny after he cleaned up Victor’s vomit, dragged him back to the village, and put him to bed last night. Johnny answers on the last ring, sounding very sleepy, but he perks up a little when he hears Victor’s voice.

“Hey there. You’re doing okay?”

“I don’t feel amazing,” Victor says. “But I’m okay.”

“Oh, good. You looked pretty uncomfortable last night.”  
Victor barks out a short laugh. “You could say that.”

“You should come out again tonight. Shake it off. We’ll get you, like, a Sprite or something. No alcohol for you ‘til you feel better.”

Victor tilts his head and leans back on his sheets, which are sweaty and unpleasant. He feels pretty vile right now, and he’s still in pain, but he also really, really wants to go out and have fun with other people while he still has the chance.

“Okay,” he says eventually. “In a while. I need to do laundry.”

Johnny laughs. “Of course. We’re not doing anything for hours. I’ll call you, now that I have your number.”

“That sounds good. I’ll see you later.”

“Great. Bye, Victor.”

Johnny hangs up. Victor drops his phone on his chest and closes his eyes and groans, then pushes himself up to strip his bed and get some food.

Johnny calls him nine hours later. He and a small entourage of other athletes are outside the Russian building in the village, and everyone gives Victor little teasing cheers when he comes out. Victor does a queenly wave and falls in with the rest of them.

He has a much better time. They go to a karaoke bar and Victor finds out that a lot of international athletes are not multi-talented. Johnny floats by every now and then and checks on Victor and gets him a soda and floats away again. Victor catches up with Stéphane, who had taken the previous season off from injury and confides, with the help of several Long Island iced teas, that he doesn’t think he can keep competing. Victor wraps an arm around his shoulders and lets Stéphane lean against his side because Victor understands not being able to skate how you want.

Stéphane heads back early, saying something about needing to make a decision about something. Victor hangs out and looks up Russia’s current medal count on his phone until someone drops back into the seat next to him. He looks up and sees Johnny smiling at him, holding a big glass of something clear.  
“Getting crazy?” Victor asks.

“No, it’s just water. I don’t like going to sleep drunk.” Johnny takes a big gulp of water, then sets it down on the table. “Lambiel okay?”

“Injuries flaring up,” Victor says, which isn’t a lie.

Johnny nods and looks sympathetic. “It’s too bad. It’s been like eleven years in competition, though, I guess it makes sense. It builds up.”

“I guess,” Victor echoes.

They watch the new top Canadian skater - Mr. Jeffrey Canada had retired two years ago, without Victor ever remembering to call him by his real last name - singing some American pop song very badly. Johnny finishes his water and leaves to get more, but then he comes back.

He entices Victor into conversation by just deciding to talk. It surprises Victor a little, but it’s nice. Victor learns that Johnny has two dogs, so he tells him about Makkachin. Johnny demands to see pictures, and then he shows Victor his dogs, and then they talk about traveling while having pets, and then vacations. Johnny has been to Russia relatively often on his own. He likes Russian things.

“Am I a Russian thing you like?” Victor says, arching one eyebrow. He thinks he knows where this is going.

Johnny gives him that up and down look, but slow. It’s not a confused look, but an assessing one. Victor feels very bare all of a sudden, and he has a flash of memory of kissing Johnny, then Pretty Fifth Place American, at a bar in Turin four years ago.

“I think you’re exactly the kind of Russian thing I like,” Johnny says. “But I’d better make sure.”

Victor expects a pickup line after that, but he doesn’t get one. He expects Johnny to invite him to go somewhere private, or at least to the back bathrooms, which Victor is not too proud to do, but he doesn’t. He gets Victor another soda and spends an hour talking about Cheburashka and music and traveling for fun. He shows Victor pictures of monuments in Japan with the top half of his face poking up from the bottom of the frame. He gets Victor to talk too, a little bit, about watching movies and what it was like to grow up in Russia and what his rink mates are like. Victor has an honest to god conversation with someone not from Yubileyny about things that aren’t skating for maybe the first time in years. The people around them get drunker, but Victor is sober and Johnny is on the boring, fading side of tipsy and Johnny just talks to him.

Victor catches himself feeling bizarrely grateful and he looks away because his eyes sting and he doesn’t want to deal with the humiliation of getting emotional because someone made a basic effort to get to know him. Johnny doesn’t notice for a moment, but when he does, he touches Victor’s forearm. “You okay? Not feeling good?”

“Do you want to go back to my room at the village?” Victor asks. “There’s a– there’s a lot of movies on demand, and it’s quieter. Do you want to go do that instead?”

Johnny studies him, and then he smiles and nods. He has a very genuine smile that makes Victor’s heart hurt because his doesn’t really look like that. “That’d be nice. Let me go tell my parents.”

He wrangles the other two American skaters and talks to them for a minute, then comes back and puts his jacket on. “They said not to do anything they wouldn’t do, but Evan is a freak, so who knows. Are you ready?”

Victor nods. He gets up too, pays for all of his drinks, and then heads out. He and Johnny walk back together in comfortable, quiet conversation. Johnny talks about Catholicism and fashion. Victor doesn’t know much about either of those things, but Johnny talks to him like he does, which is actually kind of nice.

A few other Russian athletes catch him coming in with an American boy in tow. No one says anything, but Victor expects that he’ll hear about it later.

Johnny pulls all the blankets off the bed and prods them into a comfy sort of nest, then wraps up in the hoodie Victor gives him and scrolls through on demand movies. They end up watching something by John Wayne, which Johnny swears up and down is the way American life really is. Everything Victor sees at Skate America is an illusion. The Junior and Novice skaters paint backdrops. Victor laughs pretty hard at that, and Johnny keeps egging him on until there are tears in the corners of his eyes and he feels good.

Victor falls asleep about an hour into the movie and wakes up to something in French nine hours later. He fumbles around for the remote and turns the television off, then peers into the blanket nest. Johnny is still there, very soundly asleep, his hair a mess and his long eyelashes resting against his cheeks. Victor feels like his whole body blushes just looking at him.

He sits in his own brain for a little while, and then he reaches over and shakes Johnny awake.

Johnny blinks open one eye and looks around, confused, before his gaze lands on Victor. “What? Victor?”

“Stay here with me for a little while,” Victor says. He knows that his eyes are burning, and his skin feels hot too. He squeezes Johnny’s wrist lightly. He doesn’t try to hide his intentions at all.

Johnny looks at him in that same appraising way, softened by sleep, and then says, “Okay.”

Johnny leaves a couple hours later to check back in at the American building. Victor lies on his now very unmade bed and stares at the ceiling, tingling pleasantly, feeling strangely light.

Then he reaches over and checks his phone and finds out that Stéphane has retired from competition.

He goes to the Swiss section of the Olympic village to look for Stéphane and finds him (at the direction of some other Swiss athletes who he doesn’t know, but they know him and they know what he’s here for) in a common room with ice on both his knees. Victor sits down and Stéphane looks at him and sighs. They talk for a while, about the pain Stéphane is in all the time and the state of Swiss skating. There’s another Swiss skater, Christophe Giacometti, who has been doing very well, and Stéphane trusts him to carry on his legacy. Victor remembers Christophe from a couple years back, but had lost track of him. He’s here, somewhere in Vancouver, having competed in the men’s singles and finished in fourteenth. He’s not in the building; Stéphane says he’s probably out sleeping in someone else’s village.

He sounds so resigned when Victor asks him what he’s going to do. He doesn’t know yet. More knee surgery, probably, or at least a long rest break. He won’t stop skating, but the competitions are killing his body, and he doesn’t want to give it the chance to irreversibly damage him for the rest of his life. Victor nods along but he can’t imagine not skating until his body gives out and refuses to carry him anymore.

Medal won and career ended, Stéphane has a plane ticket back to Europe the next day, so there’s an impromptu retirement party among a large section of the figure skating contingency. Someone rents out an entire club and fills it with skaters from all disciplines and all countries. Some people have gone home already, their events finished, and some people are preparing for their competitions and don’t want to risk anything, but pretty much everyone who is free does come. It’s a wild mess, but Stéphane laughs and dances and drinks and has a good time, and everyone else does too. Victor leans against the second floor railing, watching a crowd of people dancing against each other on a solid black-painted stage. He swirls his drink a little, then drains it, brings it back to the bar so no one has to bus it, and loses himself in the middle of the crowd. There are plenty of skaters who would love the chance to dance with Victor Nikiforov, so he gives it to them.

There’s an achey sort of sadness in watching Stéphane retire in real time that Victor never had to deal with when Evgeni retired, and he doesn’t really know what to do with, or why it’s even there at all, sitting heavily in his chest. But he doesn’t want to think about it, so he thinks about other people and the bodies moving all around him and the round of absinthe shots that Stéphane buys the ten nearest people so he can fall over laughing about how none of them know how to drink it.

Victor gets drunk and throws his arm around Stéphane’s shoulders and tells everyone in the club what an honor it was to get beaten by him in the Grand Prix _and_ at Worlds. He makes Stéphane call Sarah, the female Swiss skater he’d met four years ago, on his phone so he can yell good luck wishes at her. He hugs Stéphane too much and tells him not to retire, but Stéphane just gently pries him off, kisses Victor’s cheek, and pulls up the leg of his jeans to make Victor look at his surgical scars. They’re big and nasty looking, so different from the small laparoscopic ones that Victor has. That’s sobering, so Victor goes back upstairs and drinks some more until he gets cut off and someone - he doesn’t even remember who this time - takes him back to the Olympic village.

He wakes up still drunk and Stéphane is already on his way back to Switzerland.

Yakov has a skater in the women’s singles this year, so Victor can stay for as long as he wants, and he wants to stay. It’s not the smartest thing to do, but he never indulges like he does at the Olympics, so he stays and he hangs out with other skaters and hockey teams and skiiers and people who slide rocks across ice rinks for a living. He sleeps with Johnny a couple more times, and they go out and get brunch together and talk about dog grooming and skating costumes. The loss of Stéphane hurts, but Johnny makes Victor feel a little like someone is still in his corner.

Victor goes home after the women’s short program because he starts to feel the effects of lots of partying and no skating. He leaves Yakov behind and falls asleep in Canada and wakes up over Finland. He gets back to Saint Petersburg around noon the next day and immediately goes and gets Makkachin from the dog hotel. Makkachin jumps on top of him and Victor laughs and hugs him and rubs his face against Makkachin’s ears.

He switches his phone plan from his international one back to his usual Russian one and takes a picture of himself and Makkachin at his apartment. He sends it to Johnny and attaches the message _made it back. see you at worlds!_

Johnny misses Worlds. He texts Victor good luck, with a picture of him making a peace sign and holding his own dog. Victor smiles and wins bronze. He and Johnny text sometimes, but then Johnny takes the next season off, and then he gets married, and then he takes the next season off too, and Victor lets him slip away. He keeps an eye on the American skating scene, but now it’s just full of people he doesn’t know again and he feels bizarrely abandoned in the back of his throat.

~

He trains hard over the summer. He goes to the conservatory and commissions someone to come to his practices and write music for his programs. His theme this year is fresh beginnings, starting over, rebirth, that sort of thing. His rink mates think it’s about his chest surgery and his transition, but it’s not. It’s about the Grand Prix. It’s about a missed competition and a missed medal and all of the missing competitors Victor grew up skating against who have fallen away over the last couple years. It gets to Victor in a way that things normally don’t, and he doesn’t know what to do with it except skate it all away. If he skates the weird ache in his chest, he just has to put up with it for a season and then he can throw it away and grab shards of old emotions for his exhibition skates if he wants to. He can get over it and move on and stop thinking about how it hurts, if he just puts in the time now.

His choreography has a springlike theme to it, and his costumes reflect that. He starts working on a quad Lutz again, because he wants more than what he already knows. It comes back to him pretty easily, but there’s still a period where Victor spends more time on his ass than on his feet and it reminds him of being a teenager with elastic bandages around his chest and a complete disregard for consequences.

They’re good programs. Yakov complains about having less input than in seasons past, but when Victor shows off his completed programs, he doesn’t have much to add. They’re good, Yakov agrees. He can win with them. He can get back to where he was before he tore his ACL. Victor doesn’t think that’s good enough, but it’s a place to start.

He wins the Grand Prix final and at the banquet after, Yakov clinks their glasses of champagne together. “To the first of many more,” he says jovially (Yakov is already several glasses of champagne in) and Victor raises his glass and drinks. He’s won before, but now he has the whole rest of his career out in front of him. Evgeni won gold at the Grand Prix three years in a row, back when Victor was still in Juniors, and Victor knows he can do better than that.

He does his best to get to know the other skaters, now that the ones who really knew him are gone. Some are starry-eyed toward him; Michele Crispino, a brand new eighteen-year-old Senior from Italy who scraped into the Grand Prix final and scraped out again in sixth, is both in awe of Victor and bizarrely defensive of his sister, like Victor is going to try to talk to her and kidnap her back to Russia. Said sister, Sara, who won bronze in the women’s division, seems perfectly nice and excitedly asks to take a picture together, which Victor allows with a bright smile for her phone. Other skaters are less hesitant; Second place Cao Bin entices Victor with conversation and tiny shrimps on tiny sticks and then asks him all about his training regimes. Georgi, who came in fourth and has known Victor for long enough to be unimpressed, complains to him about the exhibition skate being after the banquet and not before it this year. Christophe Giacometti is there, having come in third, and Victor drops down into a seat next to him and just starts talking. Christophe’s eyes light up and he leans on his hand, swirling a glass of wine that he isn’t drinking, and they have a conversation. It’s a conversation about skating, sure, but it doesn’t seem like Christophe is trying to get anything from Victor, which is a nice change of pace at a banquet.

But at the end of the night, he heads back to his hotel room on his own, goes to sleep on his own, performs his exhibition skate on his own.

He wins again at Europeans, and at Worlds. He wants to know the other skaters, but he also keeps winning gold medals and it holds him apart from them a little. An extremely drunk French skater tells Victor he hates him at the Worlds gala, and then laughs like it’s the funniest joke. He’s not serious, but Victor believes him. The French skater is retiring this year at twenty-five and he’s never won a major competition final because of Victor.

He looks at all the other men’s singles skaters and he wonders how many of them hate him. They’re all taller and broader than he is, even with the extra muscle he’s put on from the hormones. By all means, one of them should have the endurance and the height and the strength to outpace him, but they don’t. None of them can catch him. Maybe they could, but Victor won’t stop running ahead in order to find out.

~

Competitions are starting to blend together again. The galas and the short programs and the costumes and the scores don’t change much, and the faces swap in and out for each other, all in the same places. Victor performs like a beautifully painted machine, flawless and dazzling and perfectly, clinically executed every single time.

The ice is white and neverending across three continents. His six medals look identical in the box on his bookshelf.

The view from Victor’s hotel room changes, but the view from the top of the podium never does.

~

“Second verse, same as the first?” Evgeni says.

He’s at the gala for Worlds, being honored by the FFKK for fifteen years of skating. He’s a national ambassador for Russian figure skating now. It doesn’t suit him, but neither would a broken back.

“I’ve done it before,” Victor says. “The season before my ACL, I got all four golds.”

“‘Third verse, same as the second’ doesn’t rhyme in English, though,” Evgeni says.

Victor smiles a little. “I guess not. No silver in the Grand Prix events, though.”

“That’s true, that’s true. I know the final is the one everyone worries about, but two Grand Prix event golds are nothing to look down on.”

“I certainly don’t.”

Evgeni snags a waiter who looks at him with starry eyes and grabs a couple of bruschettas. He hands one to Victor, who pops it into his mouth immediately and washes it down with champagne and groans in pleasure. Evgeni watches him, then eats his own, and they make quiet small talk for a moment until Victor can’t help but ask.

“Do you miss it? Skating?”

That seems to catch Evgeni a little by surprise, and he studies Victor’s face for a moment before he answers. “Yes, actually. I do.”

“Oh,” Victor says.

“It’s difficult not to miss it when it’s such a large part of you,” Evgeni continues. “How many hours a day do you spend with Yakov? Six?”

“Eight, some days.”

“Eight, wow. He’s really pushing you.” Evgeni squeezes Victor’s bicep lightly through his suit. “It’s not like you need the extra work.”

“It can’t hurt.”

“I think we both know that it can,” Evgeni points out. Victor is quiet. “It’s been a rough transition. I’m still getting used to it. I see my wife more now, though, and my boy, when I can. It’s a different sort of responsibility now. You know?”

Victor doesn’t know. Victor has no idea.

“I take him skating sometimes,” Evgeni says wistfully. “At the little rink across Saint Petersburg, near your old club. He’s only six, but he’s a natural.”

“Are you going to put him in lessons?”

“Maybe. When he’s older. His mom is edgy about it.”

Victor nods. He’s met Evgeni’s boy just a few times, and never for very long. He seems like a fine child, but Victor doesn’t really know how to talk to children anymore.

Evgeni raises his glass and gulps down the rest of his champagne. “I’m just saying to enjoy it, Vitya. It never lasts as long as you want, but this is your night and that,” he taps Victor’s sternum, like the medal is still there, “is your world championship.”

He sets the glass on the table and gets up and walks away, getting pulled over immediately to talk to someone else. Victor watches him for a while until he disappears into the crowd.

He drinks more champagne and eats more bruschetta and stuffed mushrooms and talks to sponsors and skaters and coaches, and then he takes a fresh glass outside to a balcony. The hotel overlooks the city, and Nice is beautiful at night. Victor breathes in deeply, and then sighs it all out from the bottom of his chest.

“I thought only one person at a time was allowed to sulk out here.”

Victor spins around, nearly knocking his glass off the edge of the balcony. Christophe Giacometti is sitting on a bench against the wall, incredibly dapper looking and holding a glass of red wine between his knees.

“I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“It’s fine. For the best. Self pity doesn’t become me.” Chris takes a sip of wine. “What are you doing out here?”

“Just getting some air,” Victor says. “Sorry.”

Chris waves his hand. “Don’t apologize. Come on, come wallow.”

He scoots to the side, leaving half the bench empty. Victor looks at the spot, then comes over and sits in it.

Chris leans back against the bench and swirls his wine and breathes in deeply, then takes another sip. “Oh, they spoil us.”

Victor manages a small, half hearted smile.

“Well, I came in fifth and didn’t manage to get a medal. What’s your excuse for being out here?” Chris asks.

“I don’t know. Getting away from the crowd.” Victor turns his champagne glass in his hands. “I saw the future.”

“World champion _and_ a psychic? Some people have all the luck.”

That makes Victor smile for real this time.

“What does the future look like?”

“It, ah, how do you say it in French? It sucks.”

Chris laughs. “It can’t suck too much, just look at you.”

“I know, I know.” Victor touches his sternum again, where Evgeni had touched him. “Now is fine. It’s just… later that I’m worried about. After.”

Chris looks at him for a moment, searching for something, then nods. “Never talk to the veteran skaters.”

“How do you–”

“Being the one to follow Stéphane Lambiel is not the easiest thing to do,” Chris says. “He was a good mentor, but he was Stéphane and he was injured all the time and he won often, even with you in the picture.”

A fleeting ache passes through Victor’s chest. He shoves it away. Stéphane retired two years ago - Victor can’t keep feeling upset about it.

“I don’t imagine it’s any easier coming after Plushenko,” Chris adds. “You’ll match his medal count, at least.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.” Chris drapes his arm around the back of the bench. He looks a lot older than he is right now. Usually, he’s flirtatious and funny and he makes Victor laugh, but tonight, most of that seems to be scraped away. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for some of those to be silvers. But you’ll get there. Don’t let him scare you.”

“Evgeni doesn’t scare me,” Victor says, which is true. It’s not Evgeni that scares him, but everything around him. The wife, the child, the drag of retirement and injury keeping him away from the ice. The small rink in Saint Petersburg filled with regular people and no space. The things that Victor does not have and does not want, or the things that he does not have and wants desperately.

“Well, he scares me. He looks like he could kill me,” Chris says, deadpan.

Victor chuckles again. “He’s toothless, really. He mentored me, too. He taught me how to do a quad flip.”

“Bastard,” Chris says lightly. It’s impossible to tell if he’s serious or not.

“You didn’t skate badly,” Victor says after a moment. “Your quad toe was clean, you deserved a better G.O.E.”

Chris gives him a tense look. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?”

“That. What you’re doing. Trying to make me feel better.” Chris sips at his wine and leans the glass on his knee. “It’s disappointing. It’s going to be. You’ve failed in Worlds before, you remember how it felt.”

Victor does remember how it felt. He remembers being seventeen years old and tanking Europeans and clawing his way up at Worlds and being _wrong_ for the competition. He remembers how badly he needed Worlds, how desperate he was for a medal in the _men’s division_ like he couldn’t prove himself otherwise, and how Worlds didn’t care. It didn’t give him anything that he needed and it left him alone on the ice, five spots below proof that he was worthy of being there. He remembers the feeling of mediocrity after two and a half years of dominating Juniors. It made him work harder, but it also hurt very badly.

“Yeah. I remember.”

Chris reaches down and squeezes Victor’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. You’re fine. Plushenko is old, so who cares what he has to say.”

Victor cares, but he finds himself smiling anyway. He drinks his champagne and looks back at the city. “What will you do when you finish skating?”

“What will I do? Hmm.” Chris tilts his head in thought. “Modeling, perhaps. Or maybe some online college courses.”

“Have them shoot you from the knee up,” Victor advises.

Chris gives him a small smile, one that acknowledges and shares the pain that both of them are in most days that radiates up their ankles and shins. “What about you?”

Victor shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“I understand. Nothing really compares to skating,” Chris says.

Victor nods, but Chris doesn’t understand. Chris has someone new on his arm every year and hobbies like dance and amateur photography. He travels a lot during the summers. Victor thinks he has a cat, and a very tall boyfriend who takes care of it when he’s out of the country. Chris is right in that nothing compares to skating, but Victor doesn’t really have anything to compare it to.

Chris drains his wine glass, then stands up. “I’m going to head back inside,” he says. “See if anything interesting is happening.”

Victor doesn’t really want him to leave, but he nods anyway and leans back where Chris’s arm had been. “Let me know if things get crazy.”

Chris raises his empty glass in agreement, then heads inside, leaving Victor alone on the balcony. Victor sighs and balances his glass on the bench, then goes to the balcony’s railing again and looks out over the city. It sparkles at him. He tries to sparkle back.

~

Victor sparkles like his two silvers and four golds the next season.

Jealousy and awe sparkle in unequal measures in his competitors’ eyes.

Everyone wants to be like Victor Nikiforov.

~

“What story would you like to hear next season?” Victor asks over his champagne glass.

Chris tilts his head to the side. “I’d listen to any story you had to tell me.”

They’re in France again, at a restaurant in Florence. Victor is on vacation. Chris is on vacation. It’s past eleven at night and there are six other champagne glasses and four empty plates at the table that have outlived their usefulness.

“I’m no font of wisdom. Unless you want to do a quad flip.”

“I would love to do a quad flip,” Chris says wistfully.

“You’ll get there.” Victor clinks his glass against Chris’s, which is sitting on the table, and then swallows half of the contents. “I need to commission my free skate music for next season.”

“It’s April, darling,” Chris points out. “Worlds was barely a month ago. Give it a rest.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Victor grumbles. “Yakov is sending Georgi to the World Team Trophy instead of me, since he didn’t make it to Worlds.”

“Georgi is spoiled,” Chris says, amused.

“I must be too delicate to go compete with a team.”

“Don’t rip your ACL again.”

“Right after Worlds is the best time to do it, if you have to.”

Chris raps his knuckles on the table. “Don’t jinx yourself.”

“Please. Your coach wouldn’t allow me to set foot in your rink, let alone get any practice in.”

“Josef is a fickle man.”

“Perhaps for the best.”

Chris reaches up and takes his glasses off and polishes them with the tablecloth, then puts them back on and peers at Victor. “Oh, there you are. For a second, I thought Victor Nikiforov had left and someone who didn’t live on the ice was having dinner with me.”

“Delicious champagne dinner,” Victor says dryly. He takes another sip. It’s very good champagne. “I don’t know. Last season was so…” He makes a vague flapping gesture with his hand. “You know?”

“I know you won a third straight Worlds title with it,” Chris says. “So it can’t have been _too_ –” he mimics the gesture that Victor made.

“I don’t want anyone to think I’m getting soft in my old age,” Victor says lightly.

Chris rolls his eyes. “Twenty-five. You’re ancient.”

“You’ll feel that way one day,” Victor says, patting the back of Chris’s hand. “Maybe I should go for something faster this year.”

“Go get in a car chase,” Chris suggests.

“If I wanted Yakov to kill me, there would be easier ways to go about it.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You’ve made it this far.”

Victor scrunches his nose, then steals Chris’s champagne and drains the rest of the glass.

“Short program: you drank my champagne. Free skate: the hangover,” Chris says.

“I don’t get hangovers,” Victor says.

“I’m Victor Nikiforov,” Chris says in a very bad Russian accent, “And I’m an enormous liar.”

Victor reaches over and plucks Chris’s glasses off his face and puts then on. “And I am Christophe Giacometti,” he says in an affected Swiss accent, “and I am paying for dinner.”

“Liar. Pay with your prize money. First place makes so much more than third.”

“Take it up with Cao Bin,” Victor says. “Second makes more than third too.”

“I am very aware.” Chris holds his hand out and Victor gives him his glasses back. “Come back to my hotel. I’ll give you something to choreograph a free skate about.”

“Perhaps your talents are better suited to a short program,” Victor says. His eyes shine a little.

Chris gapes as wide as he can. “ _Mon cher_ , I am mortally wounded.”

Victor laughs. He raises his hand and immediately, someone dressed all in black is coming over with the bill. Victor puts his credit card into the slot and hands it back. “Short program about your hotel room. Free skate about the walk of shame back to mine.”

“The Americans are calling it the stride of pride these days,” Chris says.

“It’s hard to stride with a limp,” Victor says, and winks.

Chris pretends to gasp and pushes at Victor’s shoulder. “Come on. There’s a place here that serves brunch until three in the morning. Or we could go to Tabasco. What do you feel like?”

What Victor really feels like is going home to his dog and putting on a movie and falling asleep in just a pair of sweatpants, away from everyone who will want to take pictures of him. But he’s on vacation and he’s missed Chris and maybe he can find someone to dance with at Tabasco, so he gives Chris his best winning smile. “Dealer’s choice. Have you ever steered me wrong before?”

The waitress comes back with Victor’s card. He takes it, tips a hundred euros because he can, and signs the receipt. He stands up and swings his coat around his shoulders and holds out his arm to Chris. Chris tucks his hand in the crook of Victor’s elbow.

“I’m sure I have. Let’s see if I can do it again.”

Victor has a good time, kisses a boy who has never heard of him before, blacks out drunk, and wakes up on Chris’s hotel room floor.

He has a hangover.

He misses his dog.

Chris sets a glass of water down next to his head. “Don’t vomit on the carpet.”

Victor groans and mumbles into the floor, “Free skate about vomiting on the carpet.”

~

Yakov has a new Junior skater. He will win the Junior Grand Prix. He is tiny and furious and brilliant. Victor recognizes him, sort of, the first day he practices with all the Junior boys. He asks someone about it. That’s Yuri Plisetsky, he’s told. A skating prodigy from Moscow. He trained in Yakov’s novice camps. He supports his whole family. He is thirteen.

Victor watches him. Yuri Plisetsky can already do most triple jumps - he can even do a triple axel but his triple loop is cagey - and he tries to do quads in practice all the time. He’s small enough that he can pull them off, and young enough that he bounces off the ice like rubber and gets right back up when he under-rotates and falls.

Victor remembers being thirteen, sort of. He was about Yuri’s size, maybe a little taller, just starting to fill in more and grow in the wrong directions. He tried to do quads too, and bounced off the ice like rubber and got right back up. But he was fourteen when he nailed his first quad and Yuri Plisetsky can do one already.

He tries to talk to Yuri, but Yuri does not spare him his rage just because he’s Victor Nikiforov. He shoves at Victor’s hand when he tries to help him up and snarls and skates away. Victor raises an eyebrow and watches him go. He makes suggestions to Yuri’s spins during breaks and Yuri slaps the water bottle out of his hand and immediately has his ear pulled and shouted into by Yakov. He sees Yuri watch him practice, out of the corner of his eye, and then mimic his step sequence a day later, a scowl permanently etched onto his tiny, delicate face as his skates slide and skip nearly perfectly across the ice.

He thought that he had seen himself in Yuri, but maybe not. Yuri Plisetsky is already a different creature entirely, and no one was ever like Victor Nikiforov.

~

Victor makes a new Victor mask.

He still has the old Victoriya Nikiforova mask too, tucked away in a box with all of his Junior medals and certificates. He can look at it, if he wants to. All he has to do is search for the 2004-2005 Junior Grand Prix on his Wikipedia page. It was when he looked the least himself, way back when. He can still put it on, sort of - if he stands still, back curved forward and to the right, one arm across his face, he remembers what it was like. Coyly shy and prodigiously talented.

It’s different now.

Russia and the press and the ISU all have different overlapping images of what they think a male figure skater should be. Victor stretches prosthetic personalities over himself to fit. He’s strong, but gentle, but masculine, but lithe, but muscular, but delicate, but fierce, but gracious, but confident, but humble. He’s Russia’s hero and the ISU’s poster boy and the media’s favorite plaything. He’s a womanizer even though he’s gay, he’s sleeping around even though he hasn’t had a partner in months, he has a drug habit even though the strongest thing he’s picked up since his last surgery has been ibuprofen, he’s retiring even though he’s already commissioned his short program music for next season. He was spotted with two girls in a club in Moscow the same night he perfected his quad Lutz, at Yubileyny, alone. He never bothers to deny anything.

Victor reads tabloids because sometimes he doesn’t take particularly good care of himself. He reads them over coffee at the rink and he reads them out loud to his rink mates, who laugh and jeer. He smiles at them, _isn’t it all so ridiculous?_ and quietly solidifies inside until all of his organs are made of lead. It’s his resistance training - he can’t stop weighing himself down with thinking in practice, and then in competition, he blanks out and soars.

He lets Russian actresses and singers take him out on publicity dates at movie premiers, and he kisses some of them, not because he’s attracted to them but because they’re nice and he has a good time hanging out with them before they never speak again. He watches two Russian Senior level skaters flame out - one through a drug habit and one through a nervous breakdown - and another drift into obscurity. He posts a video of himself doing a new step sequence on his official Facebook page and gets over a million likes on something he throws away the next week. He goes to a nightclub in Saint Petersburg, buys a round for everyone, takes pictures with fans, and then goes home stone cold sober. The press loves it, the sponsors flock in. He signs multi-million dollar contracts to endorse things he has never used. He makes a couple of very bad commercials, and is wholly embarrassed by them.

He poses mostly naked with other Russian athletes for flashy magazine spreads leading up to the Sochi Olympics next year. Makeup artists fuss behind his back over what to do about his scars. Victor pretends not to notice that they really just don’t know what they’re doing, and he lets them put makeup on them to make them look softer and nicer. They’re not very pretty, because he’s not very good at resting. He stretched them too fast and went back to practice too soon, so they’re a little twisted and ragged and wide, not thin and even. No one cares that he has them, but they’re not neat. They’re not straight like his blades. They are not soft. They are not nice.

He wants to kick his feet up on the makeup table and make them all look at them. They are destroyed the way every skater’s feet are destroyed - they’re calloused and scarred and bruised and swollen and ugly. Victor makes no pretense. Everything below the knee is bad.

The media loves pretense and they shoot him from the knee up.

He wins and wins and wins. He dominates every ISU sanctioned event. Nationals is a joke now, where everyone else competes for second place. His medal box is getting full, but the idea of hanging them up so that he can show off to no one but himself every day kind of makes him feel sick.

Victor moves apartments three times in two years, because he can’t get settled in any of them. He hires and fires composers in as little as a fortnight because each of them try to start from a building block that he’s already used before. He tries to date men who have never ice skated before and breaks things off again in mere weeks.

He’s flighty, the press reports with all the glee of someone sharing family gossip over dinner after two glasses of wine. He’s crashing and burning. He’s never skated better. He’s retired already. He’s married. He’s gained weight. He’s lost weight. Look at these pictures of Victor at the beach. Look at these pictures of Victor modeling jackets. Look at these circles under Victor’s eyes. Look at these sponsors under Victor’s name.

He wins and wins and wins. He breaks record after record. He’s won the Grand Prix final seven times and Worlds six times and right now he’s trying for four in a row for both of them. He hasn’t lost a competition since the season he had surgery. Interviewers ask how he handles the pressure; pressure makes diamonds, but it ruins the carbon and coal used to make them, and no one ever remembers how diamonds are polished. On the ice, Victor is colorless and hardened like a diamond, and he is cut to shreds with a smile.

He turns twenty-six alone, on the ice, surrounded by thousands of people. His Instagram followers remember, but he doesn’t so much, not when he has Nationals to get through.

~

Victor Nikiforov is untouchable.

He’s been untouchable as a skater for a while. Everyone knows that. His programs at the Olympics in Sochi are like a formality for his gold medal. Other skaters have tried and failed to catch up to him for four years in a row. He sees the resentment bubbling. He sees it in old skaters who retired without a gold because Victor stole their peak years, and in new skaters who eagerly await the day he decides that he’s had enough. It’s a common fantasy to beat him, one that it’s now acceptable to say to reporters in public. _I want to beat Victor Nikiforov and take gold_ , because really, who else would they have to beat?

He’s friendly with the other male skaters, but he’s not really like them. He’s shorter than most of them by a few inches and better than most of them by about twenty points. The rest of them trade positions around the world rankings and change up their medal colors, and there he is, always sitting at the top with gold around his neck, watching them.

He gets along with his rink mates too, in a detached sort of way. But he’s their rival as well, no matter how much time they spend together training. Georgi is Yakov’s second best men’s singles skater, and they both know that he’ll be in Victor’s shadow for as long as Victor is around. Yuri Plisetsky is getting hit hard by puberty and hates everyone at the best of times, but now he’s talking about debuting in the Senior division at fifteen, and that’s only a year away. He sneers at Victor and says to his face that he’s going to beat him, and then falls on his triple flip.

Slowly, invitations to hang out start to dry up. Victor goes wherever he’s invited, whether it’s out to lunch or to clubs or down to the water for a beach day. But he is invited less and less, and when he is, he doesn’t know how to talk to anyone about things that aren’t skating anymore. He tries, god, he tries so hard, but they talk about their partners and their hobbies and their vacations and their friends, and Victor has nothing but his skating and his dog.

Victor Nikiforov is untouchable and no one even tries anymore.

~

“Are you going to retire?” a reporter asks Victor, again, like he’s the first person that Victor’s going to tell.

“No,” Victor says tiredly. “I’m not going to retire.”

“What’s your theme for next year?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“What do you think about the new generation of skaters? Altin and Leroy and de la Iglesia and Lee and Katsuki?”

“They’re tremendous talents and I’m looking forward to meeting them on the ice again this year.”

“What’s are you going to do next?”

Victor doesn’t know what to say.

He is _things_. He is phone alarm protein bar razor jogging shoes dumbbells ice skates takeoffs touchdowns blade guards CDs speakers quad jumps camel spins lunch pavement trees dog shit yoga mat ice packs books Instagram dinner shower sweatpants toothbrush pillow bed. He leaves verbs in the empty spaces. _Doing_ is for the blank moments during the jog to Yubileyny and the ten minutes between ordering food and being given food and the time at home where Victor has to pick something to fill his time with. He can _do_ anything he wants, but he wants nothing. He wants to fold the hours that he’s not on the rink up like a road map to cross them easier so he can get back on the ice because it’s the only thing he knows.

~

His ideas are drying up. Yakov offers him the services of a choreographer, but Victor refuses. He wants his skating to be his own, but he doesn’t know what he has left to do.

He’s twenty-six and he sees the end of his career like a finish line that he’s not ready to cross and no way not to. If he keeps going, he’ll cross it and everything will be over, and if he stops to prolong it, everyone else will catch up. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side of it. Obscurity, maybe, or professional skating for pay, not that Victor needs the money. Stéphane did some shows before he started commentating. Victor would be awful on ESPN.

Makkachin takes two tries to jump up onto the couch with Victor at night. Victor celebrates his tenth birthday by folding a coffee receipt into a little cone hat and placing it on Makkachin’s head. Makkachin is getting old. Victor is resolute in not letting himself think about this. He refuses to contemplate the death of two things that his livelihood depends on. His skating career is enough.

He clutches his skates to his heart and flies to Milan to commission an aria from an Italian composer.

“What’s your theme?” the composer asks as she leans over the barrier walls of the rented out rink and watches Victor pant as he falls out of his end position.

“I don’t know yet,” Victor says. He’s frustrated with it - he has a solid sequence of technical parts, but little to weave them together. “What do you see?”

The composer leans her head on her hand. “Longing,” she says. “Desire, but fairly innocent desire, nothing sexual or temptuous. Your beginning choreography especially suggests that.”

Victor nods. He drinks some water. He knows what she means.

He’s afraid again. He prides himself, maybe too much, on being stalwart and stubborn and unwilling to bend. He spent too long twisting himself up as a teenager to allow himself to be swayed as an adult. Yakov says he’s bull-headed, but Victor knows himself.

He knows that this is a gasp of desperation. The composer suggests a girl or a boy that Victor wants to hold onto, but it’s more romantic than that. It’s Victor’s entire life, the only thing he’s ever done since he was six years old, the thing he’s poured twenty years into at the expense of everything else, and he is absolutely terrified of giving it up.

The composer pens lyrics in Italian for him. Victor doesn’t know Italian, but he likes the way the words sound when she speaks them for him. _Stammi vicino, non te ne andare._ Stay close to me and please don’t ever leave. Victor begs his body to listen.

Victor flies home and the composer disappears for a while to work. Victor considers her words and tries to create a story for them. He imagines a boy he doesn’t want to let go, but it keeps ending up being him. There’s no one he wants to keep except himself and his gold blades and his national team jacket. There has never been anyone else - Victor has made sure of that.

After a couple of weeks, the composer calls Victor on Skype and they listen to the piece together. Victor closes his eyes and lets himself visualize the surface of the rink. A man’s voice leads his body around the ice like a waltz. He twists his wrist along with the piano as it plays, and then asks to hear it again. She replays it for him and the program is already starting to glue itself together in his mind.

She sends him the mp3 file and he sends her a hefty commission fee. He shows the song to Yakov. Yakov says he approves, and that it wouldn’t matter if he didn’t, because Victor would do it anyway. Victor can’t disagree with that. Yakov leaves him alone to choreograph, and he does. He weaves quads in with his desperation. He pulls out every last move he’s been practicing behind closed doors and throws them into the program. There has to be _something_ that no one will expect. He just has to find it.

He’s costumed for his programs and he lets the designers do what they want to him. They put him in softer colors, blue and green for his short program and pink and gold for his free skate. They’re more delicate looking to go with the more delicate programs. Last year, he was instrumental, wordless, dramatic, with heavy-handed cellos and rapid piano and black and silver and dark glitter. This is softer.

He’s assigned the Rostelecom Cup and the NHK Trophy and he wins them both. He watches Yuri Plisetsky skate and win the Junior Grand Prix final and musses his hair like an annoying older brother and lets Yuri complain at him and refuse his help. He wins the Grand Prix final and no one gets close to him, though Chris tries very hard. He gives Yakov his medal and smiles for the cameras and skates an old program for his exhibition. He puts on a suit that makes him look taller and he lets Yakov make him go to the banquet with Yuri. Banquets bore Victor these days, but he has appearances to make. He’ll go for an hour to two. That will be enough.

~

Yuuri Katsuki happens.

Yuuri Katsuki doesn’t give Victor the quick up and down look and a tiny shrimp on a tiny stick and corner him into a conversation about figure skating. Yuuri Katsuki drinks several bottles of champagne and takes off his clothes and lets Chris talk him onto a pole and dances extremely, shockingly well. Sponsors and coaches stop and look at him askance, but Victor is fascinated by the way that this quiet, shy, glass model of a Japanese skater lifts a nearly naked Chris in one arm with no effort at all. He expects this kind of thing from Chris after more alcohol and fewer officiants, but he would never have expected this from Yuuri.

Yuuri Katsuki doesn’t care that Victor is Victor Nikiforov, untouchable five time consecutive world champion skating god. He turns his eyes on Victor, dark from alcohol and a little heavy, and decides he wants to dance with him, so he does. Victor is swept up in a way that he _never_ is - when he went to clubs, after competitions and on vacations, he made the first moves, to initiate things and then to walk away. Yuuri Katsuki doesn’t have time for that. He drags Victor into a tango and guides him around the middle of a crowd with their phones out and spins him and dips him and overwhelms him. Victor is shocked, and then he gets into it, giving as good as Yuuri is. Yuuri gets him out of his jacket and presses hands all over his torso and makes horns with his hands and bites his lip as he gives Victor dark-eyed grins.

He manages to get half undressed and goads Yuri Plisetsky into a dance-off with a smug look and a challenge, and then he turns and drops himself into Victor’s arms. He rambles in Japanese for a while and demands that Victor come to Japan to coach him if he wins, and then makes Yuri Plisetsky of all people come out of his glowering shell as he break-dances all over him. Victor laughs at the impotent rage on Yuri’s face as he leaps across the floor and tries to keep up with the way Yuuri is throwing himself ass over head in the air and balancing with one hand and spinning around him. Yuuri steals a bottle of champagne from a waiter and gets in Victor’s face and drinks more and dances away again and Victor manages to get a few shots on his phone before Yuuri takes it from him, shoves it into Victor’s pants pocket, and _makes_ him have fun too.

After a while, a tall, greying Italian man appears, picks up Yuuri’s tie and pants, apologizes profusely, and drags Yuuri out of the banquet hall by his shirt collar, Yuuri complaining loudly all the way. Everyone watches as the doors close after them and there’s a moment of silence, and then quiet, slightly uncomfortable chatter starts up again.

Victor just stares at the doors. He fishes his phone out of his pocket and looks at the few pictures that he managed to take. He regrets that he didn’t manage to get a phone number or even an email from Yuuri, but Yuuri was drunk enough that he probably wouldn’t have remembered how numbers work anyway.

~

Victor tries to keep an eye out for Yuuri after that, but he disappears. Japanese Nationals are at the same time as Russian Nationals, so he turns his attention home, and then there’s Europeans to deal with and Yuuri isn’t in the Four Continents, and then it’s Worlds and Yuuri isn’t there either and Victor takes his fifth consecutive world championship gold.

“What do you think the next season will hold for you?” a reporter asks at the press conference.

Victor doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’t know how to. He thinks about it, and then he says that he’s got next season’s programs in the works, so they’ll all have to wait and see where those take him. It’s an acceptable answer, and non-committal enough that he can get away with spending Otabek Altin’s next question wondering how he could possibly make it through another season like this and still come out on top.

~

And then Yuuri Katsuki happens again.

For someone who only made it to the Grand Prix final at age twenty-three, Yuuri Katsuki is happening an awful lot.

Mila texts Victor a link to a YouTube video that Yuri had been yelling about during training. She says it’s a fan recreating his program from last season and what does he think of it? True to the original? Smile emoji snowflake emoji Japan flag emoji.

Victor opens the link and zeroes in on the name. He can’t read the kanji of the title but his phone translates it from _勝生 勇利_ to _Катcуки Юрий_ to _Katsuki Yuuri_ and he sees that face and he remembers. He hasn’t had time to think of Yuuri much since he didn’t make the list for Worlds, hasn’t had time to think about anything but his programs, but he remembers now.

Victor remembers Yuuri’s disastrous finish at the Grand Prix final last year. His short program had been okay, landing him in fourth spot below Leroy, but Victor remembers something _happening_ to him and complete self destruction during the free skate. But whatever _happened_ isn’t happening anymore, because Yuuri does nearly a perfect copy of Victor’s free skate. Quads get simplified into toe loops, but the artistry is breathtaking. It’s skated with a passion that Victor can’t see in himself anymore - he watched videos of his free skate after he won, to see if there was anything he could have improved on, and to himself, he looks mechanical. To everyone else, he looks beautiful. He looks at Yuuri Katsuki dancing across the ice at an empty rink in Japan and he imagines that this is what everyone else sees when they look at him.

 _Be my coach, Victor!_ Yuuri had demanded, and then vanished. Victor doesn’t know how to be a coach. He’s been with one coach or another since he was seven and he never paid attention to how they did it. Victor knows how to conduct on the ice, but he’s pretty clueless about how to do it off the ice.

He watches the video again. The angle is oddly low - maybe Yuuri had propped his phone on the barrier wall against a water bottle or something. He slips out of frame a couple times, and then slides back in, ethereal. He looks like the kind of person who has something they want to stay close to them. _Stammi vicino, non te ne andare_ , Yuuri begs something. Victor wants to know what it is.

He wants to watch Yuuri skate this program in person. He wants to see it with the right jumps, with the music, with the costume and the crowd and Yuuri enchanting everyone. There’s so much _there_ that Victor is jealous of it. It won him medals with no emotions. He created it because he had to. Yuuri is skating it because he _wants_ to and he _loves_ it and he _needs_ it and Victor wants all of those things. He aches so badly for the feeling of being shaky and inexperienced and infatuated with the moment before the music starts.

He looks at his apartment, which is big and open and full of stifling air and not much else. He looks at his skates, which are sitting on their usual shelf, half unlaced and staying dry, gold covered up by terrycloth soft guards. He looks at his box of medals, which he keeps on a shelf, out of the way but close enough to the surface that he can drop a new one into it five or six times a year.

How much would he really miss any of this? And how much would he care, if he also remembered how to love ice skating again?

“Makkachin,” he murmurs, stroking the dog’s head. Makkachin yawns and peers at him. “How do you feel about starting over?”

Makkachin barks and licks at Victor’s chin.

Victor smiles softly. “Yeah. Me too.”

**Author's Note:**

> [See a pdf of the notes for this fic here](http://docdro.id/F3jXI0k). It has the timeline of Victor's life, some research on skating, testosterone, other real life skaters, naming conventions, etc, and some of the skaters that show up and their nicknames. Stéphane Lambiel and Nobunari Oda are referred to by their full names because they appear in the show, and I tried to leave pretty much everyone else obvious but not fully named. 
> 
>  
> 
> edit 3/19/18: hi it's me your friendly neighborhood anirondack (who still checks ao3 every day). it's been nearly a year since i published this and it's one of the most read and commented on things i've ever written. i read and save every comment and the way this fic has touched trans people is important to me. that's what it was written for - a real trans narrative that incorporates gender without only ever being about gender. i've gotten so many lovely messages from people who say that it resonated deeply with them and that it was amazing to see an experience like their own without the constant threat of transphobia. it's been a privilege to see something positive and real come out of something i've written. thank you for reading it <3
> 
> there used to be a very long message here asking for people to stop leaving unsolicited 'constructive criticism' about how unrealistic and wrong things are when the point of the piece was to showcase a trans person who was powerful and successful regardless of the stage of their transition. you should still not do that - but instead of an emotional plea, i'm just gonna say that i don't care about the inaccuracies. this is a narrative first and foremost and the choices i made fed the narrative. if you want to tell someone about how inaccurate it is that victor can do quads, tell it to your own butt. :)


End file.
